There Is a Season
by girlville
Summary: This fic starts at the beginning. It is primarily a character study.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:This is my newest offering. It's another epic (length) I haven't mastered that brevity thing yet. This has no storyline relationship to my 2 previous fics. This one is a completely canonical interpretation of all 10 seasons (at least that's the plan). I feel like I'm embarking on War and Peace. I cherry picked episodes and scenes that I liked and felt were really pivotal to character development and relationship growth.**

**Again this is an M fic but not at first so give it a shot even if M isn't your bag.**

**"To everything, turn, turn, turn" (in case you were wondering - ****Ecclesiastes for the purists)**

* * *

><p><span><strong>ONE<strong>

She didn't humour nerves generally speaking, but today, well, today felt like a day to give in. Today they were going to be assigned their first case (murder permitting). She pulled on a dark suit and eyed herself critically in the mirror.

**_That's a good little boy_** she mocked her androgynous reflection. Androgynous by the super sexy standards of her previous position anyway.

She ran a comb (and then borderline manic fingers) through her straight short hair each time finding they tumbled into thin air at the base of her neck, grasping for length that wasn't there. She'd gotten this haircut after her last case in Vice. Vice was a place for fishnet stockings, leather minis and scraggly long tresses that looked just a little to shiny, just a little too clumpy. In Vice she'd needed to be the lowest common denominator - inviting all the boys in the hood to 'go into her' mathematically speaking of course. For all those years she'd gotten her look just right when she reeked of wrong. When Major Case had accepted her - yes much like admissions to the Ivy League many applied but few were invited - she had shorn her hair like an eager cadet and treated herself to the least sexually appealing outfit on the rack.

Fun and games were over.

* * *

><p>Alex marched mechanically up the wide granite promenade toward the 12 foot tall glass doors of 1 Police Plaza. The grandeur said 'you've arrived' and her posture said<strong><em> I'm here to get a job done.<em>** She sped past reception and into a crowded elevator. She reached around a woman in a hijab to press eleven. She was ready for a case. She'd been ready for this day since the academy.

But was he?

When she stepped off the elevator and onto the floor of the squad room he was already there and he was doing what could only be described as holding court.

Her partner.

Her new partner.

Robert Goren.

He was the one head and shoulders above a small crowd of women. Alex recognized their backs. A temp admin from holding named Laura, another was Deakins' right hand Sherry and the third was Jeanine from HR. Alex rolled her eyes. If this was business she was a supermodel. One look at her partner's big, thick body and that unsavoury predatory glint in his eye and she wanted to turn around and leave the room. But she didn't because this wasn't day one, just case one. Alex had been working shoulder to shoulder with him for almost a month now. A month wasn't long enough to be comfortable but it was long enough not to be surprised. In their month together she'd seen this phenomenon before with Goren and the ladies. There was clearly something compelling about him, Alex couldn't say what exactly because she wasn't in his thrall, but there was _something_.

1 month and with him it felt like 12.

So far they hadn't done any actual detecting together, they had been working in a grunt capacity.

"Consider it Major hazing" Jimmy Deakins had laughed, dimpling them to death. "Everyone here has gotten it one way or another."

So, as ordered they'd been tailing the top MCS detectives nothing demeaning really, just watching bits of someone else's action interspersed with doing bits of someone else's paperwork. Basically learning the ropes through rote and review and reprimand. Things were different in this rarified air 11 storeys up. They weren't precinct po-po anymore and they needed all that provincial thinking beaten out of them. They were padawans on the precipice, plucked from obscurity because of their stellar records. Major Case detectives were expected to have a certain cachè, a certain breadth of knowledge, a certain confidence and most of all an approach that set them apart.

So with all these notions of greater good and higher calling floating around her skull was it any wonder that Alex was disappointed? She gave him a look. And then she gave those women a look. And like fancy confronted with reason his groupies seemed to evaporate. And it was just the two of them on their grey metal 8 legged island, divorced from the hustle and bustle of the squad room around them.

She nodded at the retreating herd of women. "Is there a clerical crisis I should know about?" Her voice jabbed like a pen knife, quick and dirty, because that was where her strength lay.

"Ha ha." He said dryly lowering casually onto the desktop. Somehow she'd thought he would straighten up, dial it back for an actual case. But Alex found on this oh so important day Goren still had two settings: ON and MORE ON... _**Moron. **_**_No, no. MORE ON._** She tried not to be hostile - even on the inside - because she knew hostility could seldom be kept a secret, it was toxic.

"Good morning Alex." He greeted her formally, even cheerfully, starting over. He swivelled toward her on some poor piece of paper that wrinkled and tore under his posterior.

"Goren." She slapped him back into the 'I'm not your friend' zone. But she kept her eyes on him. How could she avoid it, he was the biggest thing in the room. **_And_ _I'm the smallest. This partnership is a cosmic joke._** His suit was crisp so that was one thing (at least he took dressing seriously) but his hair was maybe a shade too curly, even though she conceded the dark riotous cap suited the boyish fullness of his cheeks.

Lest she look too long (lest he see her lingering gaze as an invitation to chat) she turned away and began to settle in. First sliding off her trench coat, then her purse, then her leather attachè and there was a theme there too, black, sober solid black. A serious colour. She could feel him watching her and so she let her eyes trace the seam between their butted desks. Which reminded her of another petty annoyance, he was sitting in the desk _she_ wanted. It wasn't the actual desk, all these rusty metal cans were the same, it was the _aspect_ facing Deakins' door Alex hated sneak attacks. But her partner had fast talked her on desk selection day - something about long legs and proximity to the water cooler and blah blah blah…

"How was your evening?" he asked casually still perched atop and she casually looked at him like he had 6 heads. What was it about her downturned eyes and iron body that begged for small talk? _**Some detective.**_

"Did you finish the R-10 from yesterday?" She asked instead.

"Finished and filed." He smiled. He let the heel of his shoe bang the metal desk rhythmically. It felt like a gong to the nervous system. Alex sat very deliberately hoping he would follow suit. He didn't. She wanted to ask him if something was wrong with his chair or if maybe he didn't bend at the waist like the rest of us, because she was seeing now - 23 jittery days in - that he liked to _move_, that a chair was a death sentence to this man. He was the king of perching, leaning, crouching, shaking, rocking and gesticulating. She wanted to carry a skein of rope in her purse, she wanted the option of tying him up.

Instead she asked, "Deakins in yet?"

"No, traffic on the Verrazano sucks."

_**How eloquent.**_

"Figures." And she sighed long and deep and he read it. This was her day. This was the day when she was supposed to become a bonafide Major Case detective. The promise of it hovered in the air just frustratingly out of her reach. **_She wants the action_** he thought, they'd both come of age on a diet of action. And he was so right, Alex felt like she'd been waiting her whole life for this. She just wanted to_ get out of here._ She wanted to hop into a car, she wanted to slice through traffic with purpose, she wanted to duck under the yellow tape with authority. But funny, discomfited by Goren as she was, she didn't make the connection. She was so hell bent on disliking him she didn't see that first ethereal tether form between them, the first tether in what would become a lifetime of tethers.

They were both restless souls.

_She wanted to move too._

* * *

><p>It wasn't until 11:07am that the alarm finally sounded.<p>

"Goren Eames! You've got one." Deakins yelled.

Sweetest. Words. Ever. Uttered.

The energy was addictive, their captain's voice booming, his powerful stride marked with urgency. He briefed them in rapid time on the newest Major case. "Two college kids found dead in a Brooklyn first floor, and $300 million dollars - give or take - in missing diamonds." As briefs went did it get any better? Alex could have swooned instead she grabbed her coat and checked her piece. "You got your binder? Your cell? Keys to your requisition?" Deakins was worse then her mom, but they loved every second of it. The captain stepped up to the big man and straightened his tie and said "Make me proud."

Then he turned back to his office and let them fly.

* * *

><p>In the grey concrete cavern of the 1PP parking garage Goren moved to the driver's side of the big black SUV. Eames headed him off. "I like to drive."<p>

He looked down on her "Shouldn't we draw straws or something."

"I _am_ the short straw." She looked up, way up, scrappily. And because she made him laugh and because he understood the subtext, that driving was the great equalizer, he took his seat in on the passengers side. When they arrived the squads were parked everywhere, lights of blue and red rolled slowly and cops crawled all over the city block denoting _their_ crime scene. _And it was theirs._ Everyone deferred when Major Case arrived and that shot through both of them like a rocket.

_Power._

_Awesome power._

Unfortunately like all highs it was short lived. By the hands of her watch it took all of 15 minutes - the distance to run the gauntlet between their vehicle and the parents couch - to be exact. 15 minutes before Goren had taken his gigantic wingtip and inserted it into his equally big mouth. Alex listened to him tell the tortured grieving parents, "Mr. and Mrs. Kersten uh, I can't tell you how sorry we are for what happened to your daughter but _we will_ find the people who did this."

_**Rookie. **_No one said it but every law enforcement professional in the room thought it, in concert. The epithet was so silently loud that it blew their hair back.

"The Sergeant said they were professionals." That from the destroyed tearful father, "That the chances of you catching them were…"

"Mr Kersten I give you my word. We'll catch em." Goren reiterated earnestly.

And sitting there, Alex sensed that this wasn't an anomaly.

This was Goren and this was only the beginning.


	2. Chapter 2

"How's life with Goren?"

"Hmmmaphhh." Her noncommittal sound was muffled by a King sized pillow.

Alex sat up slowly and pulled the pearlescent, butter-soft, gazillion thread count sheets over her bare breasts. She was surrounded by tasteful neutrals, all the accoutrements of the good life. The thick cream coated club chair, the steel bedside table with heavy gauge glass top, the plush diamond embossed carpet, the fresh flowers in a dense cut crystal vase. **_What man has fresh flowers? Who cuts them? Who throws them out? _**The detective in Alex was very curious. Most of the guys she knew picked their outfits off the closet floor and gave them the sniff test.

"That good huh?" Ron said pulling up his pants and securing the zipper. This was a nooner. At his apartment. Glistening droplets clung to his shoulders from a recent shower.

She and Ron.

Ronald Carver.

For 2 weeks now.

Banging it out almost every day.

She looked around his well appointed sex pad again. All Alex could say was that the city must pay their legal teams well. A damn sight better then their cops. Ron had this apartment, small but perfectly formed, with views of lady liberty and it wasn't even his primary residence. Then she gave her head an invisible shake. This wasn't city salary money. This was something else. Ronald Carver had airs about him, a certain poise, an elocution that spoke of either acquired wealth or pedigree or both. And God knew he was smart, a John Jay undergrad and Harvard Law alum, summa cum laude. Alex knew everything about Ron (everything that was on the public record at least). She was a Major Case detective after all. And she'd filled in any blanks by wheedling free even more personal information with a few carefully crafted questions. She'd even registered for an account on 'CareerClub' (a website) just to check out his CV.

She watched his bare dark back as he moved around the bedroom with ease and she considered their acquaintance. She had met Ron a few times during her stint in Vice but she'd never really _known_ him until her promotion. They had chemistry, but little else in common, which might account for the fact that she'd let him bed her on their first 'date'. The 'date' had been a drink after work, still in suits and feeling less then fresh. But drinks had lead to a suggestion they go somewhere more comfortable, which had led to a car service - a big black Lincoln - whipping them across town, which had lead to unlocking the door to his place, which had lead to him taking her body on his big firm mattress.

Alex had never been with a black man before this little tryst. She was ashamed to admit it but she'd never imagined there was a black man on earth that could sexually interest her the way Ronald Carver did. Alex Eames had become a victim of her job, roaming the halls with a patrolman's mentality. When she'd thought about men of colour, his colour specifically, she conjured images of hoodies and petty crime and pants so low even gravity was baffled. Now she was moving in all kinds of new circles. Now her scope was expanding everyday. 1PP was opening her eyes and her thighs.

She moved her legs restlessly under the gossamer linen. She felt a low grade throbbing. He had been a well-endowed, aggressive lover. She quickly tried to quash all the readily accessible stereotypes about penis size, feeling quite mortified that her mind was so narrow and her attitudes still so hayseed even after all those lessons on the mean streets. Some things were bred in the bone she supposed.

"You don't mind if I leave first do you?" Ron asked, "I have a meeting with Lewin in…" He glanced down at the solid gold face of his Rolex. "45 minutes."

"Hit it and run?" She joked.

He laughed deep and moved toward her. She looked good there, beguiling him with pale flesh, a hint of cleavage and clear soft eyes. He sat down on the edge of the bed "I'd like to spend the whole afternoon 'hitting it' but we civil servants have to earn our crust." He grabbed her mouth with his and she closed her eyes and got lost in it for a moment. She liked this. Really liked this. And she liked him. Probably because he was so casual. Probably because he was taken.

She just didn't want to do the relationship thing right now. Alex had to stay on her game, especially with Goren. **_Goren._** The thought of him upset the idyll. He was so infuriating and so cocky and so inappropriately frank with Deakins. Even Ron's lips on hers weren't enough to quell her Goren rage. Perhaps she could have forgiven Goren his quirks if they hadn't exacerbated her own shortcomings so. Alex felt like a shy kid when she was in a room with Goren, hedging her bets and couching her words and playing it straight. While he boldly pointed fingers and threw out indictments. Not that it didn't come back to bite him occasionally:

_**"Whoever ran this show was impulsive, organized but impulsive." Goren strutted around Deakins office gesturing broadly and in that moment Alex wanted to dissolve into the floor.**_

_**"Goren I realize how unstimulating all this police procedure can be for a right brained guy like you, and I say this with all of the respect due a detective 1st grade - touch all the bases." Deakins pulled his eager detective up short. "What else?"**_

_**Now, Alex thought, was her chance to step in and bring this briefing out of the realm of speculation, "Uh they probably had to pull blueprints so we'll check with the building department and we ran down the limo company that took the Kersten's to Atlantic City we're waiting to hear back."**_

_**"Very nice Alex. Give me a status at 2 o'clock."**_

_**It was all she could do to stop from sticking out her tongue.**_

Carver pulled her back. "Same time tomorrow?" he asked tucking a hand down under the sheets rubbing the nub between her legs, she moaned.

"Can't tomorrow, we're out, sting time."

"You're ready already?" He looked surprised and impressed.

"Goren thinks we are." she pursed her lips.

"You really don't like him." Carver eyed her speculatively.

And she eyed him back deeply conflicted. Yes, he was her lover, but what would that even mean next week, next month, next year? He was married. Separated, but still married. Not only that he was a career driven shark. She didn't trust him with her confidences. "I shouldn't be telling tales out of school." She said at last.

"Lawyer client privilege?" He teased.

She squinted, considering, weighing, then she decided his opinion might be more valuable then any damage her words could do. "Goren is a wild card. He hatches all these crazy plans, he's one big bag of suppositions…" she sighed "And he runs his _big mouth_ to the brass, _to the victims_. He's here, he's there, he's everywhere." She shook her head in exasperation.

Ron stopped her with a hand at the small of her back. His gaze was steady, his nod slow and rhythmic. "I understand your frustration. Goren is big, deep and little tannic…"

"Oh, sure, he's a glass of merlot…" she quipped.

He chuckled again "But that's why you're here."

"What do you mean?" Now she was staring at him, hard. Now she was holding her breath waiting for his valued assessment. She felt a knot form in her stomach.

"Goren is brilliant and I don't say that lightly," his lips ticked up " but his brilliance is in the realm of human behaviour and it's esoteric. Your brilliance" He tapped her head gently "lies in your grasp of police procedure and your broad acumen."

Well he certainly didn't play coy with the big words, but she got his meaning and she wasn't sure she liked it. "You're saying he's the genius and I'm the heavy. They hired me to weigh him down? To make sure his balloon stays anchored to earth."

"In part, I'm sure."

"Great!" She huffed angrily, "Thanks…"

He stopped her. "I think they got it right."

"How do you figure?"

"Look, what I'm about to say is pure conjecture, I wasn't in the meeting that decided your fates, but I do know Jimmy Deakins. Don't question your abilities. Deakins wouldn't have lobbied for you if your skills weren't commensurate with Goren's. A lesser person wouldn't know where to start with a man like that. Deakins knows you won't take it from him, and that Goren won't be able to leave you in his dust."

She didn't know what to say.

And Ron had said his piece.

He leaned in and kissed her forehead softly. Then he stood up and went to the bathroom. She heard the water running. No doubt he was washing his hands. That was Ron in a nutshell: sexual, frank, intelligent but most of all _proper._ He wasn't going to show up at a top level meeting with a trace of vagina anywhere on his 'temple'. Alex had read him. She saw a hint of obsessive compulsive rigidity lurking in his mannerisms. 'The Carver Way' both fascinated and alienated her. And because her heart was safe, she assessed his behaviour with detachment.

Soon afterward he left. The front door clicked calmly shut behind him and she was alone and naked in his sugar shack with only thoughts of her partner.

Alex sat long and still in that bed in deep contemplation, even though she had real world obligations, even though they had weak little Gia DeLuca sweating bullets in holding cell one. Even though before she'd left for this afternoon 'hook up' Goren had given the script for their interrogation later today. Alex'd been surprised to learn that Goren actually wrote his mad machinations down, a hashed up blend of shorthand and doodles, with a few fully formed thoughts thrown in for good measure, such was enigma of his mind.

His plan for DeLuca was a doozy. A fake AIDS diagnosis. It was a compelling idea, but seemed cruel even for the likes of that pathetic, enabling, nail nibbling, nibbet. But Eames had to defer to Goren. She'd been deferring to him for weeks now. Alex had never considered herself weak but in an argument, one on one, being met with full force of Goren's arrogance was like being crashed about by a Tsunami. Once he got going, once he pulled out his psych texts and examples she got so spun and before she knew it she couldn't see land.

Anger flared again at that.

He ran roughshod over her.

Did she want this? Was Major Case really her dream job if it'd only been offered because some eccentric needed a babysitter? How insulting really and how misogynist. Alex knew that law enforcement wasn't a haven for broad minded intellectuals. Most cops were hard and simple and many of the old guard were raging bigots. But she was still surprised. Casting her, a young, vibrant, _legacy_ female detective at the top of her game, as a nursemaid? **_What were they thinking?_** She _didn't want_ a traditional female role. That was why she'd chosen this path goddammit! She was perfectly irregular, perfectly unique and now 1PP was trying squeeze her into their boring 'square hole' with a _lunatic._

_**He's a good cop. He's not a lunatic. He's just odd.**_

She tried to talk herself down.

_**Let him fly his freak flag**_ a soft voice implored.

But she was way past reason now.

She made up her mind that day (whipped into a feminist fervor while naked in a powerful man's bed) that she wanted Major Case, they would have to pry Major Case from her cold dead grip, what she didn't want was Robert Goren.


	3. Chapter 3

**THE EXTRA MAN**

She submitted the request.

She had waited until Goren was out on a private appointment. Gratefully they got moments alone during the workday, moments when she could spread her files over that dividing line or make a unilateral decision. Otherwise they would probably have killed each other for all this imposed togetherness. Dentist appointments, haircuts, sexcapades or even taking out a mortgage (as she'd done last week - goodbye Flushing hello Forest Hills) all had to be done on the city dime or they would never get done at all.

"Can I talk to you?" Alex tap tap tapped on Deakins open door casting a guilty glance over her shoulder at their empty desks, because even though this was a new partnership, a betrayal was a betrayal.

"Sure." The greying smartly-kept man looked up and clasped his hands expectantly.

Alex really liked Deakins, compared to O'Sullivan in Vice he was like a cookie baking, snuggle-giving Grandma. He wasn't half bad to look at either. **_Down girl. How many times can you dip your pen in the company ink?_** Besides Jimmy had been married to Angie for a lifetime already and the way he talked about her, that soft affection, well they should be making sausages together or getting an all-American award. Honestly, Jimmy and Angie was so much better then Jack and Diane.

Alex took a seat. "It's not working out. Me and Goren."

He leaned back. Annoyance was a muscle that twitched in his jaw. "I think you're calling the season a little early. You've got 5 wins, no losses."

"It's about chemistry." She crossed one lean leg over the other.

He sized up his detective. This captain had been doing this a long time, at least 12 years longer then Alexandra Eames, and he knew one thing she and Goren did not lack was chemistry. Watching them was like watching two halves of a whole. Up until 5 minutes ago he'd been patting himself on the back. "I know he's a handful." Deakins selected his words carefully, "but it's a learning curve. He needs to dial it back, you need to ramp it up. You'll be fine."

"No. We won't." She looked boldly into Deakins' open face. She handed him the paperwork. She'd gotten it from HR and then hustled it upstairs. There was no time to waste she wanted it signed sealed and delivered before she became grist for the gossip mill. She suspected Goren had laid his way through the girls in that department. Add to that the law of women (the one about the elegant gender being one another's harshest critics) and Alex didn't expect any loyalty. She could have sworn she heard someone murmur "_bitch"_ before she'd even cleared the door frame, then again that might've been her conscience. Clutching freedom in her hot little hand she hastily tucked into her desk and proceeded to dot all the i's cross all the t's. Then she penned the required handwritten explanation. Putting her frustration and anger into a civilized, coherent blurb was hard, but it was also good because the paper was but one foe, her captain was another entirely. Alex knew she would be held to account.

Deakins stared at the sheets like they were space dust. "Did Goren do something?"

"No." She moved her head restlessly. "Look. Can I level with you?"

"Please do." His gaze was unwavering.

"This is a boys club. I know that, you know that. I can deal with anything you/they hand me, I'm a damn good cop. But…" She paused "Look, I have ovaries but I'm nobody's mother. And I sure as hell am not here to govern someone else's behaviour. I want to work with someone that understands the politics, that appreciates my contribution and that wants what I want." She was breathing heavily now, her hands were trembling now, she was coursing with bile and moxy. She hoped he understood this outburst. She hoped he could empathize with her and grasp all the crap she had put up with to get here. She hoped he knew she wasn't yelling at him, just railing at the injustice of it all.

"Okay." he said at last.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I respect your position. We'll set the wheels in motion."

**_The putsch more like._ _That was easier then I thought._**

This whole conversation felt so wrong to Alex and yet _so_ right.

Freedom.

She could taste freedom.

* * *

><p>She was sitting at her desk when he came back. Sitting as though nothing had happened at all.<p>

"Hi." he rumbled.

"Hey." She didn't look up.

She heard the soft plop of something, then the crinkle of something else. She had to look up now. Coffee and a crumpled paper sac sat right in her field of view. She met his warm brown gaze.

"For you." he said.

He may well have said "Et tu Brute?" And revealed her as just another in a line of deserters. And yet she sat here deviously as he rewarded her with drinks and snacks.

"Thanks." She didn't know what to do, so she reached out and took a sip, _**perfect**_, 3 sugars one cream, not too hot.

"No problem."

"Where's yours?" She asked kindly. She hadn't given him much kind lately.

"My mouth is still frozen." He gave her a half-smile, palsy style.

"So you just went… You only got coffee for…"

"Yeah. No big deal." Goren shook off his coat and sat. Actually sat. He was doing that more now. He was settling into himself and into their duo. "But I went to see Sydney Markham first."

She stopped mid-sip "Oh?" _Now_ she remembered why he annoyed her so much.

He did that a lot; went off on his own to work the case alone then filled her in after the fact, "Yeah I figured since it was on the way." He scanned her face for an 'okay' he got a stony glare. "She just needed a push, a male one. She's very susceptible to masculine overtures, it was best I go alone."

"If you say so." Alex bit out. "Did you get anything?"

"Not from her, not yet." He said giddily, "But let's play a hunch. Look up Sammy Bell for me, Markham's driver." Alex wanted to snark_** I'm not your secretary**_. And it was so mean. It was so out of the realm of normal workplace responses that she immediately knew that going to Deakins had been the right thing to do. Their personal politics were getting in the way of the case, at least for her. She looked at his bent curly head, he was blissfully ignorant, _**the birthright of men**_ she skewered him silently.

She pulled up the requested RAP sheet. "Besides driving Mrs. Markham Samuel Bell has been arrested for bookmaking and a couple of dope pops."

"The book making, who were his associates?" Suddenly Goren was beside her leaning into her. She could feel waves of heat warming her left side. _**Sure,**_ she thought _**a man this size can probably power a house or roast a turkey with his kilojoules of expended energy**_.

"Two. Tommy Dunan, and Leslie Roche convictions for:" She ticked through, "Assault, assault, assault..."

"A collector." Goren surmised.

"He's still on probation, couple of phone numbers."

"Let's track him down." They stood in an unchoreographed rhythm searching the squad room for the silence of a land line and closing office door. Once they were settled in he gave her an unsolicited pep talk, "You have be sweet, bubbly, innocent. Can you do that?" He leaned in, "Because we can get Laura and script her up."

"I was vice, I was more actor then cop for 7 years." She bit out in annoyance. "Give me a break. This is pie."

He looked at her. _Now_ _he saw something_. Anger and unhappiness and in that moment waves of realization swamped him. She wasn't settling in she was distancing, documenting grievances, cataloguing slights. He'd seen this before. Goren knew he wasn't what you'd call a get-along kinda guy. Partners to Robert Goren were like Kleenex, fresh, new, useful, then dirty, then gone. He'd been a detective for 10 years and he'd been through 8 partners. But he liked Alex. More then that, he liked himself with her. He liked that he cared what she thought of him. His deep respect for her helped him govern himself appropriately. He didn't want to say goodbye to Alexandra Eames and all of a sudden he knew that goodbye was coming. "I... I didn't mean... I... Sorry."

"Uh huh." She brushed him off. She picked up the phone dialled and was instantly transformed in someone else. Someone who was just as he'd described. "Hi! Is Les there? It's Sandi..." She started, her voice young and guileless and her affect magnetic.

And because he was but metal in her field, her force played on him, he listed toward her.

He couldn't pry his eyes away.


	4. Chapter 4

**THE PARDONER'S TALE**

"Eames I gotta see a buddy about a '71 Malibu you wanna come?"

"Sure I love meeting your buddies." And there was only the barest hint of sarcasm. That was a real chunk of personal growth for a woman like her. A woman who acerbically oozed. Goren had more oddball buddies then anyone she'd ever met. Bikers and computer nerds and ex-military sharpshooters and people so powerful in the fed they could hide someone from themselves. For Alex every misfit was another piece of his puzzle. And rule number one was know thine enemy.

Turned out Goren's buddy that day, was the most normal of the lot. A mechanic. It was all very 'Some Kind of Wonderful' with the grease and plaid and wrenches. Neither of the detectives fit in, skirting half assembled cars and welders sparks in their sharp smart Brooks Brothers facades. But one thing was for certain, Goren's was relaxed. Very relaxed. _Known you for a lifetime_ kind of relaxed. Alex made a note of that. Not that she'd need her mental dossier once she was shot of him of course, but for now it made sense to keep a log.

"351, four barrel. Who you trying to outrun?" Alex leaned under the hood and blew the boys away with her automobile prowess. She loved doing that.

"Whoa I think I'm in love." The greasy man looked up all besotted from under the hood. Bobby didn't miss Lewis' hot eyes roaming over the length of Alex's retreating body. Lewis was never subtle and no one would call him undersexed.

Bobby whacked him hard just to stop the ogling.

"Man you have got to get me a piece of that." Lewis said almost loud enough for Alex to hear.

"Calm down! That's my new partner. I really don't need a sexual harassment allegation on top everything else." He muttered that last part.

"Oh I get it, you've pissed her off too. You are professional kryptonite man. You need to start playing nice. People _can_ like you, I'm living proof."

"Oh shut up."

"Just be subtle with her, test the waters for me. I'd take her out in a heartbeat."

Bobby rolled his eyes "I'll see what I can do."

NOTHING. A big fat nothing. That was what he was going to do. He felt very possessive of Alex all of a sudden. He didn't want to hand her over to Lewis. Not that she was Bobby's to do anything with, mind you. Truth be told he was a little bit afraid of Alexandra Eames. And it was a weird feeling. He had never tread lightly with a partner before. He had never worried about offending them. His constant self awareness around her, was both limiting and gratifying and he couldn't ignore what it meant. It meant he cared. And because he cared there was nothing he could do except build a bridge.

So he sat beside her and plotted; as they rolled along on their city issue leather seats; as he watched her profile; as the air vent blew on his cheek. Lewis had given him a gift. The gift of impartiality. Detective Goren couldn't up and ask Detective Eames if she was dating, how inappropriate. But a guy named Bobby could be wingman to a guy named Chris Lewis. His smitten friend was the perfect excuse to get his relationship with Eames on a more personal trajectory. He desperately wanted to know more then what had been in the file he'd charmed out of Susanna in HR.

"I like your friend" Alex unwittingly got the ball rolling as she pulled the Explorer out into traffic.

"He likes you too." That was the understatement of the year. "_Really_ likes you." Goren's palms felt sweaty but it was now or never. "I - is - is he your type?" He held his breath, they had never gotten this close before.

"He could be. I don't generally turn down gainfully employed, reasonably good looking men." She played along staring at the road, injecting a lightness they had never achieved.

"So I can give him your number?" _**Dammit.**_ This wasn't where he wanted this to go, but what else could he do.

"Uh, no. I thought this was all hypothetical," She glanced over curiously now, "I'm seeing someone."

"You are?"

"Don't sound so surprised." She said and as far as she was concerned that was the end of that.

"I'm not surprised." He said keeping the conversation embers burning, because he wasn't. She was great. A great… partn… woman. His tone made her look over because it sounded like so many shades of masculine. Unbidden she found herself thinking, **_so that's his allure._** And thinking that, sussing out his human parts, seeing his charisma, hearing the kindness in his admission, made her soften a fraction.

"You'll be breaking his heart." Goren tried again feeling strangely annoyed that Alex had found the time for a boyfriend.

"I'm sure Lewis will get over that 10 minutes we knew each other."

"Is it anyone I know?" He pressed a little harder, not looking at her as he did. "Your guy?"

"We should probably stick to the case." She firmly quashed his curiosity.

"Okay." He sighed and slapped his thighs with those big palms.

And they rode in silence for a mile. Which was just about the length of time it took for Alex to start to regret being so short with him. "Or maybe I should be asking what you and Lewis got up to in a 1966 Ford Fairlane convertible? Or was that all about the big dent?" She said good naturedly.

He laughed, remembering how they had ran Vicki Malloy's new VW into a lamppost. Dented it up so good he couldn't even get out the passengers side door. But Vicki _had_ managed to slap his face through the broken window. He told Alex as much.

And she laughed.

Really laughed.

And it was sweet and melodic and normal.

And Goren began to hope that they would be okay.

* * *

><p>To say he was brash was an understatement.<p>

Bold.

Impertinent.

Skating on the edge of nuts.

Shouting, "Boo! Made ya look," into the ear of a suspect. That was new. Twisting his torso like a warmed street pretzel. Alex shook her head what she and Deakins and Carver really needed to accompany this interrogation was a bag of popcorn.

And when it was over, and when Goren exited stage left (mopping his brow and looking for accolades), another thing became glaringly obvious to Alex, he (her partner) just didn't like her lover.

**_Lover_**. There were so many words she could use to describe her relationship with Ron but only lover really did justice to a mature, mutual, sexual arrangement. It was there for all to see. Robert Goren and Ronald Carver repelling as like poles would. Bouncing away from one another in frustration time and time again. The count so far was 4. Goren had gotten right into Ron's face 4 times during this case and every time come away frustrated.

And Alex? Well she'd had the unique opportunity to stand back and place her bet. Which boxer would be victorious? Her money was on Ron. He was in the power seat. He was the one who would define this case. A case that pissed in courtyard of the Executive Mansion. Albany was so much closer then it seemed. Ronald Carver understood self preservation and moderation and a measured approach. And Alex was pretty sure he was about to school Goren. Goren who thought that moderation and measure were nothing more then quaint words.

"This is big. Very big." Goren murmured to Carver looking through the glass of observation room 5 at Joe Nawrocki and his lawyer in their muted tete a tete. And there was awe in the detective's tone. He understood the potential scope of this case. Goren was daydreaming about taking the Governor of the state of New York on a perp walk.

"According to a drug addict." Carver's voice was low and slow.

"What you don't think he was involved?" Goren's voice went up an octave with the dawning of his own awareness. Goren was seeing Carver more fully now, this 'ally' was actually an opponent. Way over on the other side of the spectrum, politically speaking.

"I do, I just don't think it goes beyond him."

"What did you vote for the governor?" Goren's pitch almost cracked on incredulity.

"I take it you didn't. But then again that wouldn't influence _your_ judgment would it?"

The other thing about watching them, was that Alex felt surprisingly impartial as they verbally tussled. It was odd, considering she was so deeply bound to both of them. You would figure she'd have been all churning guts and 'boys please stop'. But she instead she found herself goading silently. _**Oooooh nice one Ron**_ or **_Don't let him get away away with that, go for the jugular Goren_**.

She didn't know where this bloodlust came from. She supposed there was a psychological root. Normally Alex didn't truck with all the impalpable notions that psychiatrists plied - mommy issues, daddy issues, birth order, potty training standoffs. But in this situation it was clear she had issues. She had a lot of repressed aggression for both men. She darted her head back and forth between them, lost in thought. From short to tall, from dark to light. Ron the philanderer and Robert the relentless. _**And Alexandra the facilitator**_ she snarked **_don't absolve yourself here_**. She could have told Ron to _fuck off_ long ago because he was married. Instead she'd laid down and spread her legs. She could have pulled Goren aside at anytime in the last 7 months and given him a talking to about his behaviour, instead she'd sat silently and then gone over his head. Maybe she was biding her time so she could relish the eventual explosion when she walked away, from both of them. But she feared that wasn't it at all. She feared that her anger flowed from weakness. Both of these men had weakened her and that struck at the heart of her sense of self. So like a victim she stood there impotently and silently urged them to drop the gloves and go at it. All it was missing was a ring full of mud, no jello, **_you want to see what you're getting_** she smirked privately.

But she couldn't sideline forever. Her silence would be conspicuous. And when it came to this case there was really no ambiguity about how Alex felt. Both her politics and her self-interest aligned with Goren's so she had to throw in with him. "I like my job too captain but this is going to go where it's going to go."

And as the energy in the room left his favour, it was clear the ADA'd had about enough. Carver spared a moment to shoot her an annoyed glance. Then he turned and Alex swore it was on the sweep of a large black cape. And Deakins was there but he seemed decoupaged to the dull grey wall. Only three people existed, three points of a bizarre triangle.

"It's not going anywhere unless we have corroborating evidence against Mr. Nawrocki. Until then I'm not going near a grand jury."

Ron knew how and when to exit - before he was compromised, when he was on top.

Always on top.

* * *

><p>"They should teach this case in the governor's school of government." Carver preened although he'd won on a double cross he'd tricked them into perpetrating.<p>

"Law school ethics class that's where they should teach it." Goren wasn't so forgiving.

Alex stayed mum, best not to tread here, especially since in the end it was a draw. Goren was enormously self-righteous and Ron was exceedingly pompous, and yet they were both strangely correct. And because Alex couldn't straddle two points of view, and because she had to choose, and because she still wasn't prepared to go off in a third way, _her own way_, she turned into a brisk wind on a wide New York promenade and matched her partner stride for stride.


	5. Chapter 5

**THE THIRD HORSEMAN**

"Goren! _Come in_." Deakins commanded from behind his desk. The Captain had been drawn from his work by frenetic activity outside his office door. First that big head bobbing in and out of view, then some pacing across the opening, then wide shoulders filling the door frame, then an apelike arm that shot up and a hand that sank into the overhead casing. Currently Goren hung there waiting. Deakins hid a smile. Goren always seemed like something inside, some creature, was trying to escape. Or maybe he was at the whim of a demonic puppeteer.

"Can I help you?" The Captain hid his mirth behind a clipped speech.

The detective looked briefly over his shoulder across the squadroom at a their empty desks then stepped inside.

"Ummm…" Goren murmured, lingering at the back of the room because he wasn't sure he wanted to be here at all.

"Have a seat." And that was an order. Deakins could either watch Goren's dance of the painfully awkward or focus on his words, not both.

Goren sat.

They stared.

Deakins sighed.

Then he looked at his watch.

Tactics, all tactics. The goal was to move things along without words. He wanted his detective to _own_ the conversation because he knew exactly what this was all about.

"This is about Eames." Goren said at last.

"I figured." Jimmy leaned back in his black leather chair.

"She isn't happy." Goren admitted.

"She told you?" The rise of his voice betrayed his excitement. **_That would be great._ **Jimmy thought.**_ If Eames is talking, what a great sign._** Then they might just be able to work this out from the inside.

"No" Goren's smile was self-deprecating. "I figured it out. I've had a lot of practice with dissatisfied partners."

"What can I do for you?" The superior officer offered nothing to smooth the gritty discomfort in the room. Goren was a big boy and a student of human behaviour. He knew what he was doing and he knew how to correct it. And worse, if he didn't come to it on is own, they would _all_ be in this situation again in 3 months.

"Make her stay." Goren exploded suddenly and Jimmy arched a surprised brow. It sounded almost childlike.

"I think that's between you and your partner."

"We aren't there yet." Goren admitted.

"What do you mean?"

"We can't be candid with each other yet. She doesn't want it. Sh..sh..she's distancing. I think she's trying to keep herself from forming the attachment."

Deakins nodded. He knew exactly what the younger man meant. He knew that it was imperative that police partners bond properly and deeply. The police partnership was a lot of things, but the best analogy he'd heard was a sexless marriage, although (this Captain wasn't naive) many were also not-so-sexless marriages. He'd seen it all.

In fact given the way Goren went through partners Deakins was a little surprised at the insight. He supposed he shouldn't be. He'd lobbied for Goren for just this reason, his intellectual prowess was legendary in the inner (upper) circles of the NYPD. As a Major Case detective Robert Goren was tailor made. Unfortunately, as a man there might be some holes in his education. The thought made him both pensive and a little sad because this wasn't just a job to Jimmy Deakins. He cared.

Goren broke in. "I just need her to give me a chance. I just need another month."

"What do you propose?"

"Stall the paperwork."

**_So he knew. No one had told him but he knew._**

Deakins wondered how it felt to be Robert Goren. Did the rejection become commonplace? Was he secretly depressive? How did this man make it through? What compartments had he formed on the inside just to get the job done?

_**And God!**_ Goren's eyes were soft when they implored. They were worse then the little bich-poo (Bichon Poodle) pup he and Angie had bought for their girls last week. Why in the hell couldn't he dredge up some of that charm with his partner? Why was he a lumbering fool who went rogue the moment Alexandra Eames walked into the room? The thought annoyed Deakins to no end because there really was only one reason a man and woman disliked one another without cause. **_Maybe I should fastrack Eames' request so they can date,_** he snarked. But no, he couldn't. 10 cases in, endless kudos, a sore back from the rounds of congratulatory slapping and MCS's best numbers in 5 consecutive quarters and now the sad truth was revealed: self interest. Deakins _needed_ this pair to stay together.

"Now Goren, you know I can't contravene my detective's wishes."

"I know. But you can… I don't know, slow the wheels of bureaucracy?" He suggested. "She would never be the wiser."

The Captain leaned even farther back and gave that some thought. He was sort of doing it anyway. He'd copied Eames' request. He'd put the document in her file, but he hadn't submitted it to HR because once he did, it was out of his hands.

But in this Captain's mind there was a big difference between a personal decision to take his time with a 'TZ515: Dissolution of Partnership' and to deliberately collude with an interested party. If he did what Goren asked it would feel a little too much like engineering Eames' future. A little too much like playing God with her _male_ colleague and that was an unforgivable act of chauvinism.

"I can't do that." He said.

"You can't…" Goren's face fell like a novice souffle.

"I can't do _that_, but there is something I can do." Deakins came forward and meditated on tented fingers.

"What's that?" Goren also leaned in. He slung an ankle across one meaty thigh.

He _wanted_ Eames. _**Professionally of course.**_ For the first time in his career he was willing to sacrifice anything.

"I'll talk to her." Deakins told him.

"You aren't going to tell me what you'll say?"

"No." The Captain shook his head sharply. "No. I have to talk to Eames first. And don't balk at the outcome. Not if you want to keep your partner." Goren looked so concerned that Deakins offered further words just to sooth. "Don't worry, it doesn't affect your status or pay grade or duties." And unspoken in the crystal clear silence were the words _**but it affects hers.**_

And Goren felt himself nodding emphatically.

Eames was proud, he knew that about her. She was proud and he was obsessive.

He saw it so clearly now, the way that his single-mindedness had trampled her dignity. He hadn't meant to offend but he knew he had. If he wanted her to stay, she needed to have her value quantified and codified.

The thing about Robert Goren was he didn't want to lead. He wanted autonomy, no, he _needed_ autonomy but he would gladly cede the details of power to her capable hands if they could just keep working together. That was all he wanted, he and Deakins were on the same page. Just like that he surged to his feet and made for the door, he left, then he turned and came back and said "Thanks." Then he was gone again.

"Good talking to you too." Deakins muttered to the Goren sized void he left behind.

* * *

><p>She was in the power seat and she was loving it. This case was the most unedited Goren had ever seen his partner. A raging feminist, an emotional advocate and a Miss. Bossy Pants, shouting out orders and slapping the bracelets on her nemesis with extra vigour.<p>

"Maybe you read only the parts of the bible you like but what I remember from Sunday school is that God stopped Abraham from killing." She ground heathen glass into Cutler's delicate religious sensibilities.

And their ploy the one to plant spyware on Cutler's PC, that was all Eames. It was invigorating for Goren to see her so engaged. She'd told him "paint me as an over eager bitch." Which he had and then some. Which had lead to an awkward encounter in front of Zach the tech. Where she'd held him, _her partner,_ to a corkboard of a scrutiny with her push pin eyes and demanding to know if he was _"_with her or against her._"_

"_There's reason to hope. We have friends in surprising places even in the New York City police. I met a detective who thinks picking up the sword is the only option left to stop the abortion factories._" she quoted "You told him that?"

"To earn his confidence."

"Not to mention his love and admiration."

"True believers expect everyone to think like them."

She sighed, clearly upset, "What do you really think?

"I'll tell you what I think when I get pregnant."

"You're going to have to do a lot better then that Bobby." And he knew in that moment he really had to or Alexandra Eames was going to melt him with her gamma rays. This case was making her unbelievably aggressive. It was a little arousing actually, **_professionally arousing_**, to see her so uncompromising.

"Okay," He turned and looked deep into her amber eyes, "Life is full of uncertainty, people need to have options. Abortion has got to be one of those options. That's what I think." He sensed that brevity was prudent. Say any more and he would hang himself, say any less and she would demand more. He _really did_ believe that women needed options. A world without abortion was inconceivable, but Bobby also wouldn't call himself pro-choice by any stretch. He also believed that in some degree of unborn rights, as well as contraception and contemplation over surgery. That was what he really thought, but Eames wasn't looking particularly open minded today.

* * *

><p>Alex may have been unrelenting but she was also soaring. She was feeling better about MCS all around. She'd sat down with Deakins and he had sung her (and Goren's) praises. And as a reward for coming out of the barrel like a bullet he'd given her 5% pay bump, 4 extra vacation days and senior partner status including: directing their team of two, okaying all strategies and verifying the the final version of events as they would be presented to both the DA and the brass. This new responsibility was the most gratifying thing that had ever happened in her career, save getting her Major Case position.<p>

"Have you talked to Goren about this?" She asked.

"I will. And I think he'll be on board. I think he'll be the first to admit that we need your energy at the helm."

"What kind of energy is that?" She sat stock still waiting for any 'kiss of death' phrases like feminine or multi-tasking or deserving, all of which reeked of affirmative action.

"Strength, certainty. A vision of the future with a respect for protocol. Look Alex, we both know that this job lives and dies by the protocol. Goren isn't quite there yet. You need to be running things."

She wanted to do a little jig right there in office. She managed to make due with a small smile.

"And my request?" She'd asked from the doorway as she left. She'd almost forgotten.

"It's in the system." Deakins crossed his fingers under his mahogany desk. "You'll be the first to know."

* * *

><p>Ron was happy for her too. She'd told him over lunch and then she stole way with him for 15 minutes. 15 minutes was all it took for them to work down their pants behind the closed doors of his office. She'd needed it badly. Turned out professional euphoria and sexual euphoria were very closely related. But maybe things <em>were<em> changing. She talked him out of a bed and into spontaneity. She pushed him back onto the couch and got astride. She rode herself straight to her happy place with very little regard for what _he_ was doing and feeling. And like a man, when she was done she gave him a peck on the cheek, climbed off, told him he was a great fuck (in just those words). Then she straightened her pants and went back to work.

Alex was on top everywhere.

Later they met again. In Observation room 2 with their work faces in place. She eyed Ron speculatively, wondered if this could go somewhere. She wondered if she could love him.

"Inoculate them how?" She questioned "By telling the jury you agree with Griscom on abortion?"

"Hm." He smiled and nodded, "Crossed my mind."

"You really believe abortion is murder?"

"Like I said, as long as you bring me the evidence convicting this gentleman shouldn't be a problem." He caressed her arm and made his exit.

**_Slippery as a fish._ **She thought. And it left Alex feeling as cold as one. Bobby's answer she could live with. Ron's was that of the consummate opportunist. And on further consideration it was exactly the answer she expected. Ronald Carver was as changeable as the wind. He was whoever he needed to be to win.

She needed more.


	6. Chapter 6

**HOMO HOMINI LUPUS**

This one was hard. It brought up all of her latent anger. That asshole Lucas Colter and his constant refusals of their help. That man could spin it whatever way he wanted but the fact was he was putting himself before his daughter. _His own daughter._ Because Lucas Colter was a dirty embezzler. His personal identity was so wrapped up in his stuff and his prestige, that he'd lost all reason. And let's face it, if you were Lucas Colter and your life was contest between your daughter's virtue and 14 years in a medium security prison, the kid came out a clear second.

Alex's rampaging feminism was never far off the surface. This disgusting dad was everything that was wrong with society, including the fact that women (like his wife and two innocent young daughters) were ruled by this ridiculous patriarchy, this system of masculine overlords who told women when to jump and how high! Who told women to just lay down and take it like good little victims of ambition!

The whole thing made her want to vomit.

Every ounce of this case was repugnant.

Except for Bobby.

She smiled in spite of herself, because she was trying _Bobby_ (the name) on for size. She was using it all the time now. Same number of syllables as Goren but it felt so much easier, so much friendlier in the mouth and then rolling off her tongue.

Bobby was as disturbed by all this as she was. He was fighting just as hard as she was for Maggie Colter.

For Alex the turning point had come at the top of the Colter's staircase, when she'd once again found herself gripping a newel post 5 anxious paces behind Bobby. _**Wait!** _She wanted to call. _**Don't you dare bull in a china shop this kid!** _They both watched quietly as the mother introduced them. All the women in this house had hollow victimized eyes. But Maggie's were also layered with righteous indignation.

Alex sat and tried to forge a bond. Maggie Colter was having none of it. She refused to make eye contact and her face a mask of misery. Eventually Alex admitted that in this case her sex might be an insurmountable obstacle. She quietly receded and let him handle the young rape victim. It went against everything they'd been taught to do. Women and children with 'sensitivities' about men were always better being questioned by women. But this girl had extenuating circumstances, Stockholm. She was identifying with the men that had violated her. Alex stayed mum and it was good thing, because that moment, inside that house had made her reassess everything she'd laid on Robert Goren for months: all her distancing and her snark and her comfortably negative conceptions.

At first she had watched Bobby moving and twitching and ranting and she'd cringed. He was he was brash and far too loud for this small small space and for this poor sad vulnerable teen curled up on a burgundy bedspread. At first Alex wondered if she'd made a horrible mistake.

And then the breakthrough.

And it was awesome to behold.

Alex watched Bobby sit, and then soften and then curve deeply toward their victim, then he lowered his voice,

"You want to be strong to so nobody pushes you around?"

"Yes."

"You don't want to feel weak like these girls, you don't want to be a victim."

"No"

"You don't want to feel helpless like you did when he raped you. When you couldn't defend yourself."

"No." Maggie's voice cracked.

"You don't ever want to ever want to feel that way again do you Maggie?" Goren pushed softly.

"No I don't." She broke. "He hurt me. He hurt me so bad" And it was the saddest most gut wrenching sound Alex had ever heard. Like this child's essence, her very soul was weeping.

"You're not weak, you're strong you lived through it."

And then he took her in his arms.

Alex watched Bobby coo and console, petting those scraggly ginger locks on that destroyed head. He touched that child with equally unbridled_ care_.

Alex felt blessed just to bear witness to this sweetness. _**H_e is_ a good person. **_She admitted honestly feeling her own face heat with emotion.

And slowly, ever so slowly, Alex felt that annoyance and dissatisfaction, that was now nine months deep, thaw and ripple in the warmth of a winter chinook.

* * *

><p>"How are those hands doing?" Bobby asked companionable as she drove them back to 1PP.<p>

Alex held one out, fingers splayed. "Steady as a rock."

It was the post shoot test. Were you trembling and spacey or lucid and firm? It really mattered. She looked to be the latter.

"The world is a better place without him." Bobby told her and her spirits lifted. Righteous shoot or not it was hard not to second guess.

"Thanks partner." She said and for the first time she really meant it.

"Call me tonight. When you can't sleep. Okay?" He touched her arm. The first time he'd done that with purpose.

And she felt herself nod.

She really would.


	7. Chapter 7

"You know, you can be a real bitch!"

"Right back at you." Alex yelled at her sister, her sister who thought that being married with a child meant she deserved special accommodation. Liz was constantly quoting from the wedded shrew's handbook. The older woman was a schizophrenic of entitlement. The mother in her had the right to free evenings, the nurse in her had the right to cast aspersions on all medical procedures and the know-it all in her drew up schedules with no intention of contributing to their practical application.

"Are you going to go or not?" Liz was harsh. Liz knew this was a request Alex couldn't refuse.

"Okay fine. I'll go. I'll go." Alex spat and hung up, cutting off her sister's empty gratitude.

She'd been home for all of a half an hour and now she had to change her clothes and brave the world again. She put the phone down on the countertop and sighed from her soul.

Now she had to put on her socially acceptable sweats (not these ragged worn threadbare ones that should have hit the tub of her washer instead of her body), a penchant for procrastination in laundry, in meals, was one of many dirty little secrets between a single woman and herself. When you lived alone, all these small things seemed like victimless crimes.

Alone was just what Alex wanted to be. She desperately needed a night of solitude to lick her wounds. She wanted to savour her promotion and forget about the thick cloying blood of that Serbian nightmare. Even 4 days on it squished sickly between her clenched fingers, even though she'd only fired and never touched him. Sometimes the weight of her life, the decisions, the responsibilities, _the duty_ was too much. To the world she was as steady as a rock, at home she was still a rock, only a weakened, porous one crumbling away and full of holes. She hid it well. But at times like this it threatened to swamp her.

Death.

Her constant companion.

She didn't think about Joe anymore. She didn't need to think about someone who was in the whisper of every single breath. She didn't need to think about him until she was the one that delivered a fatal gut shot. She didn't need to think about him until now, until she was on the cusp of losing someone else so _so_ dear.

Alex had a secret. She was living in the shadow of end of life care.

Her mother had been dying for 6 months now, breast cancer metastasized.

They'd prayed hard. Them all, her stooped greying father and his 3 distinct children. They had all battled, only to find they were ineffective auxiliary warriors. The real fight was in her mother's flesh and no one could help. Alex remembered it clearly, her mother so pale, so glazed, so wan. "I think I'm done fighting Ally." She whispered.

It was horrifying to watch a person you loved erode until they no longer looked like, or acted like or_ smelled_ like the one you knew. It was horrifying to visit family in a place that wasn't home. It was horrifying that sterile environment with it's uncomfortable attempts at comfort - a throw pillow on sharp melamine bench or cheery curtains over commercial grade windows. It was horrifying all of the _strangers,_ the omnipresent staff that knew _her_ mother better then anyone now because they fed her, dressed her, and bathed her. It was horrifying to watch a circulatory systems worth of tubes secured to your mother's limp limbs with tape - tubes, running clear fluids in and murky ones out. Perhaps the worst was the steel. Everywhere cold steel, knocking your hip, your arm, your head against the bed frame or the food cart or IV pole, there was nothing soft. _No._ No the worst had to be the beeping, God the infernal beeping and whirring and wheezing...

And this was where Liz was sending her, after a day of murder straight into a hospice room that reeked of death.

She looked around her living room savouring a few seconds more. Home was alchemy. Home synthesized all of her damaged people. The woman succeeding in a man's field, the sad widow, the downtrodden daughter and the broken baby tossing her toys (her virtue) out of the pram, the baby that sabotaged the good relationships and courted toxic ones. Alex wasn't going to analyze her behaviour she couldn't afford to. But she knew, _she knew_ that all this stress had to find a destructive outlet and that outlet's name was Ronald Carver.

As she shoved her legs angrily onto fresh pants. Alex wished her mother would just go.**_ Just go, just leave me alone, I need to live._** And then the guilt weighed so heavy that she clutched the corner of her dresser and almost lost that five ounces of red wine she'd chugged. And inside she plead for forgiveness. In that corner of her heart, that red pulsing ageless corner she begged, **_Please mommy don't leave me._**

Soon hot tears were spilling down her pale cheeks.

Hot tears for a million reasons.

* * *

><p>"Amanda get down here right now and clean up your sh…" His wife's hostile glare censored him. "Your stuff."<p>

The amount of crap that was unleashed in the wake of 11 year old girl was tantamount to terrorism and comparable to six toddlers. But at least back then, in the toddler phase, she'd been sweet. Back then her innocence had coated the anger like pepto bismol. How could you really rage about primary coloured building blocks, squeaky giraffes and googly eyed creatures?

This, right now, _this was warfare_. This was the baby he knew morphing into a smart-mouthed wildchild. Jimmy looked around the living room at all of the open CD cases, the bottles of nail polish and the little pink scraps of clothing that he hoped _to God_ where headbands and not skirts or tube tops. And there were a pair of bright red running shoes on the sofa and there was a book bag that had been opened, rifled through and then left mangled and gaping like a crime scene. He shook his head looking down at crumpled sheets of foolscap strewn across the carpet and Bic pens now occupied the seams of his favourite recliner.

"You girls need to get your act together!" He railed (as he did at least once daily) to deaf ears. "You're almost teens, you're almost in high school."

"Sorry dad." Amanda herself came bounding loudly down the stairs. Then the thin waif-like thing he and Angie had created, used small hands to gather, starting her disaster recovery effort. "Chloe was over we were working on our project…" And every time his daughter bent over she displayed the scalloped edge of red satin panties and a hint of butt cleavage. And Jimmy sighed. He sighed like Hercules must have, with the weight of Major Case and a mortgage and low rise jeans on his shoulders.

"Project right," He cut her off his voice heavy with sarcasm "and eating tacos" he crumpled a wrapper angrily, "And doing your nails. Just. Clean. It. Up!" And that was his final word. He'd reached saturation. He'd reached full system failure. He used one meaty hand to sweep the junk off of his precious chair and collapsed into it like his legs had given way. His eyes were closed to the venomous looks shot by the viperous females he lived with. It was hard being the only one with testosterone in these four walls.

"Jim you need to…" Angie started and he held up a hand. A single palm that would probably cost him much need closeness and coitus later, but so be it. "Take the dog for a walk." His wife finished spunkily her hands on her hips.

"Not my dog, not my problem." He announced from behind closed lids. He was already drifting on the turquoise waves off the coast of that smallish Hawaiian Island, which was it? Kaua'i. Yeah, he was floating off the coast of Kaua'i.

* * *

><p>The silence was oppressive. He sat there in his club chair legs elegantly crossed with the rocks melting into his scotch and weeping all over the crystal tumbler and making wet rings on his ebony walnut accent table. <strong><em>So what,<em> **he thought**_ so what if it marks._** And that thought was truly rebellion for a man like him.

He had no obligations, not tonight. The courts didn't have his name on the docket. His wife was probably putting Frederick to bed, but not in the adjacent room, no she was doing that some 35 miles away in a white colonial in Westchester county. **_Frederick Ronald Carver III_** a beautiful 5 year old boy. And this place this apartment - small and perfect, hadn't (like Frederick) been a consequence of their ill-conceived union. Ron had always had this sparkling little gem on the Hudson because Patrice didn't think 'the city' was any place to raise a child and Ron didn't think a 50 minute commute (one way) was any way to live a life.

So there he sat and he could actually hear the whir of his Sub-zero which had been sold to him on the promise of clean lines and complete silence.

And he felt lonely.

And he felt self-loathing there in that chair pining for his lover and unsoothed by his opulent environment. It was dark too. It was almost 8pm. And the only glow cast around the apartment came from boats throwing beams from the river, from the soft uplighting of the grand statue, from the one or two buildings that encroached on his clean view and from the orange flashing light on his cordless phone.

One new message.

Only Patrice called him here.

He sighed and picked it up.

"Ron." Her voice was shrill and the waves of her frustration made him recoil. "Ron you haven't called in two days. You have a family, please try and remember that. No one ever said on their deathbed I wish I'd spent more time at the office." And he rolled his eyes and resented her for that hackneyed little observation. She continued "Freddy misses his daddy. Ron I thought you just needed to clear your head, I thought we both needed perspective but this is getting out of hand."

He felt attacked there in his two thousand dollar suit. Attacked by the inelegant words of his wife. And he did not like _feeling_. He resented anything that pulled his emotions out of their locked labeled compartments. He resented anyone that made him feel common. When Patrice called he wondered if nature will out, if there was something genetic, a defect in his makeup, that he shared with black men all over the post-colonial world. He wondered if even with money and education if he was biologically inclined to abandon his family. He wondered if he was biologically slavishly inclined to desire a simple white cop over the cultured black princess he'd married. He wondered meanly if all these problems where more basic then that, if he chose to be _here_ and not _there_ because he'd married beneath himself. Not financially, he and Patrice had met in a world of cotillions, their betrothal had been foreshadowed (ridiculous as that was) in the black society pages. No, not unequal in wealth, in intellect.

He _had_ to believe he was _here_ and not _there_ because he craved someone equal in all things cerebral.

He couldn't think about his DNA tonight.

He couldn't do race relations alone in this dark apartment.

He thought about Alexandra Eames. _**No money. Some forgettable education. She's as common as…** _He stopped himself short, there was no need to be crass about it.

But she was smart, engagingly intelligent.

There was something about her, about the juxtaposition of plain and magnificent in that one small tight body.

He took a sip of his drink.

There was something about her.

* * *

><p>"You never visit anymore."<p>

"Ma I'm here twice a week."

"Really? You want to do the math or should I?"

Bobby wanted to roll his eyes, but for his mother the whites of his eyes were a signal to attack. She looked small and thin but it was all a glamour. She was a sorcerer that dabbled in the black arts.

"Okay this week it was once." he admitted

"And last week."

"And last week." He conceded.

"So one more time and it's a pattern." Her gaze was intense and her peaked brow razor sharp.

"No not a pattern a case." He said, "I'm Major Case now."

"Major Case, scmajor case, it's about priorities."

He tried to remind himself that she was living in a very small world, a world made even less clear by an intense prescribed psychotropic regime. He tried not to resent Frank for not sharing the burden of his mother's bottomless need for company and reassurance. But Bobby knew that his brother was about as grounded as his mother. He hadn't laid eyes on Frank in 7 years. They'd had talked on the phone a handful of times. Apparently he'd been to visit their mother twice but Bobby only knew that from the tales she told. And he'd actually gone and verified it with the staff to make sure she wasn't having an episode.

He sat back in the on a soft aging chair in the empty lounge and loosened his tie. He undid 3 buttons. His family was more drama the he wanted tonight. His eyelids felt heavy and his suit felt tight and his bed felt like it was in another dimension.

"Ma I told you all about this. This isn't Narcotics anymore, this is big time stuff. High profile cases, Major Case it's about the mayor, it's about the governor, names you hear on the news."

She pursed her lips and he wondered (quite insecurely) if she was even the least bit proud of him. "Tell me about the partner. She hittin' the road too? I don't know what it is with you and these partners. I raised you and Frankie right. I practically nursed you on Carnegie. How can people not like you? Frank, my Frankie had charisma for miles. You," she shook her head "I guess you're your father's son."

It was a low blow, given who Walter Goren was: weak, unfocused, turned by any tail in a two mile radius. _**Does she really think I'm like him?**_ And that set the ball rolling. His mind was a mudslide gathering momentum and turf and earth and homes and villagers and the bric-a-brac of life as it tore down that mental mountainside. Nothing was safe, every part of him was undone by his thoughts, by her suggestion.

He wasn't Walter. He was likeable dammit. And he wasn't attached so he wasn't betraying a wife or a family. And he was still a relatively young man **_getting older every moment_** a voice taunted. Relationships where the bailiwick of single youngish men. _**But you've gone too far,** _the voice was back. He couldn't deny it, he had been sowing his oats a lot lately. Five sexual partners in 5 months. He wondered at the uptick. **_Lighten up, it's a celebration, you're hitting your stride personally and professionally._** But no, it was more then that. He was horny, he was hooking up like the devil was at his heels. Bobby knew he'd been acting _unleashed_ since he'd gotten Major Case.

Worry creased his brow and tightened his lips.

Such was the power of Frances, with her wand and her little incantations. Such was the power of every mother really, and whether they wielded it for good or evil was the mark of their maturity.

When her PM dose arrived he admitted relief because the side effect was drowsiness. And once she nodded off he could leave. He watched his mother settle in. He watched her lids grow heavy. He planted a warm wet kiss on her brow and she smiled her lips spasming slightly at the touch. She let her hand grip his briefly. And said "I love you." In a diminished way. And he knew this last 3 seconds was the reason he kept coming back. With her defences down, hovering between wake and sleep she always loved him.

* * *

><p>Rather then running for his Mustang, he paused in the dull glow of the ward hallway. The lights had been lowered, the skeleton staff was on for the night. He checked his watch and then pulled out his cellphone. <em><strong>9pm isn't too late.<strong>_

She picked up on the third ring.

"Eames." her voice was tight.

"Hi it's me." he said.

"Hey." He heard her relax a fraction or maybe it was what he wanted to hear.

"How are you doing tonight?" He asked sitting in a corner chair behind a leathery old potted palm.

"I've been better." She moved to the doorway of her mother's room. There was nowhere to run nowhere to escape the fluorescent tube lighting. Alex missed the nuance of her home with it's shadows and warm yellow cast. But at least here in the lounge she was alone.

"The shoot was clean…" He started.

"It's not about the shoot." She cut him off, well, it was about the shoot, but it was about so much more. "Family stuff." She said.

"I hear ya."

And he really did. She sensed a kindred spirit in him and Alex felt comforted by his deep foreign voice in the middle of her difficult personal situation. "You at home?" she asked.

"No with my mom. You?"

"With my mom." She laughed lightly. So did he. Then silence.

"I should let you go. I just wanted to make sure you were okay." He didn't want to hang up but what else could he say.

"Bobby." She fought a wobble in her voice. "I'm not okay."

And he heard it and he wished he was there with her, which was silly because she wouldn't want him with her.

"What can I do?" He asked at last.

"Just sit here and breathe with me for a while. Please."

He felt a tug in his chest at her perfect vulnerability. "Anything you want Eames."

And so they sat, in their respective lounges, phones to ears, calmed by the cadence of life.


	8. Chapter 8

**SEIZURE**

Certain things couldn't be unseen.

A bell could never be unrung.

It had been a normal briefing. The pictures were tacked to the cork board. And they were all in that grey glass box of collaboration, him and her and Deakins. They were laying out the particulars of their newest case. The death of an unknown brunette in a seedy motel room (Rosa Dern as it would turn out). So far all they had were crime scene photos.

On it's face not your typical Major Case. Not until it became clear that this murder had an eerie similarity to an old serial. It had all the particulars of a crime someone had already been convicted for, stuff that had never made it to press. That was the worst case scenario for law enforcement and for prosecution: a mistake. A mistake that had managed to worm it's way through all the layers of justice missing check after check, balance after balance.

But that wasn't the bell, the one Goren wished he could unring.

The bell that kept seizing his ears like a case of tinnitus had come when Carver had barrelled in. Carver in his perfectly tailored suit and his 'just the facts' demeanour.

"How close a match is it to the other killings?" The lawyer demanded. And Goren watched his partner, 'one of the guys' Alex Eames, reach out - and this was totally inexplicable - give Carver what he could only described as a caress. It couldn't be construed as anything but a caress. Bobby had tried to reframe it in a million ways: as a 'pardon me' pat, as a generic greeting, as a 'oops, so sorry I didn't see you there.' None seemed to fit. The touch had been friendly, it had lingered and her small hand had slid from Carver's shoulder all the way down to his elbow. That was trans-Atlantic flight of touches!

Goren's eyes darted back and forth. He really wanted to ask her. No, not ask _demand_ to know what was going on.

He smartly held his tongue.

Mixed in with his incredulity there was also a hint of confusion. He'd thought… He'd thought they were building toward something, him and Eames. That last case they had been closer then ever. He knew he hadn't imagined all those little innocent flirtations. He definitely hadn't imagined that she had become his ambassador. A liaison for him and his quirks, the interface between Goren and the normal people.

"Don't mind my partner," she'd said smoothly. "He gets cranky when he doesn't get his sleep."

And Goren did a double take at that and something in him swelled, because **_that's me! She's talking about me!_**

_And their timing!_ it was like Laurel and Hardy, like Frick and Frack, like Abbott and Costello. That Judge, Blakemore, he'd reddened and pursed his patrician lips because he couldn't even muster words in the face of such a damning duo:

**_"We heard that you're up for a seat in the appellate court." Goren primed the pump._**

**_"That's right." The judge's clipped speech spoke volumes._**

**_"The fact that you're being considered is a tribute to you as jurist and a legal scholar." Goren needled with adoration._**

**_"Yes I suppose so."_**

**_"You went to Yale?"_**

**_"Yale and Columbia I graduated from both."_**

**_"You were law review?"_**

**_"No"_**

**_Eames chimed in ratcheting up the discomfort. "Or that other award they give to the top 10% of the class. Order of the Coif?"_**

**_"No."_**

**_"That's because you had a 2.0 average." Eames closed the net. The air was dense with the weight of the man's inadequacies. "What do they call that?" She lobbed a softball to her partner._**

**_"Ah, Gentleman's C's. Isn't that it?"_**

**_"If you're here to denigrate my clients record…" The lawyer broke into their little routine._**

**_"We like his record, we like the fact that he's a late bloomer." And if it this were the b-ball court they would have high fived._**

They were so literate and so witty together. Goren was ecstatic. For the first time in his professional life there was repartee. For the first he was happily sharing the duties of the takedown. Even better they had executed a coordinated strike with minimal strategic planning.

Because she was sharp.

_Almost_ as sharp as he was (of course he was full of himself and with sound cause).

In fact he was happy enough and secure enough to admit she was sharper then him in many ways, because her knowledge was coated in humour, and that humour made her far more palatable to people. Goren knew something else now too (he _knew_ it in the flora of his gut) Alex wasn't going to leave him. The partnership was secure.

They were _finally_ clicking.

But this?

This disturbing insight into her personal life, he didn't know what to do with this.

_**Carver?**_

Goren wracked his mind. Had he known? He must have known. And suddenly he saw it in a series of brief intense flashes. Eames taking late lunches, Eames and her disappearing acts, Eames looking breathless, Eames looking mildly disheveled, looking… **_la la la la la la la la la_**… he didn't want to know this.

That day 'the day of the touch' became day zero.

The day the veil lifted from his eyes.

And everyday thereafter his addiction was watching. He couldn't stop watching Eames and Carver for clues. His eagle eyes trained on them. His bizarre glassy gaze tracking back and forth. His off-putting head tilt firmly in place. His sheer absorption marked the lawyer and the petite cop as more then just a passing interest.

_**They're laughing together at the water cooler.**_

_**Look, he brought her coffee.**_

_**She's taking his side.**_

_**Her feet are angled toward him under the table.**_

Every intersection between the pair was assessed by Goren for both the case and for the subtext.

Which was hard work.

In fact it was driving him crazy.

While all this was going on, for his own sanity, he decided firmly on 'Eames'. He was definitely going to go with Eames (the name) because suddenly he wanted distance. Alex didn't seem right, at least not for a man and a woman. For some reason it was now very _very_ important to kill any speculation about them. It was very very important to get at least a names length away from her.

He wondered endlessly about her. Of course he'd wondered before 'the touch' too. _Before_ 'the touch' he'd thought he was borderline, but now he'd lost it, now he'd officially hopped the barbed wire fence and was bobbing and weaving through a minefield of speculation.

Who the hell was she? This woman he spent 12 hours a day with? Was Carver the type of man she wanted? Did she like that polish? Did she like a strict exacting personality? Did she like men of colour exclusively? No of course not. She'd been married to a cop, a white cop. **_Ohhhh, so she's a serial office dater._** But that was the pot calling the kettle, because so was he, so were they all. This job didn't leave much room for socializing. Goren felt like there was a hole. A missing irregular shape in his knowledge of Alexandra Eames. She was a mystery and mysteries were his catnip.

"Hot date?" He threw out softly. It was quitting time, and she was gathering up her coat and bags with a flurry as though someone were chasing her.

She stopped looked up briefly and smiled. "Yeah, _really hot_." Her voice had a sultry glide he couldn't miss.

"Oh, uh, oh." He stuttered out, and gathered his own desktop clutter, suddenly not sure where to take his casual (not so casual) interest. _**Really hot?**_ He was sorry he'd asked.

"I'm escorting my dad to the Police Retirees Charity Fundraiser. A room full of men, and the odd broad, over 65 really get me going."

He laughed hard and the tension fell right out of him. He hooted at her irreverence, at her appeal, at the uncomfortably racy lesbian associations. _**Down boy.**_

"Well have a good time." He offered. "Maybe there's a sugar daddy in it for you." _**Phew no Carver.**_

She gave him a look and her voice reeked of sarcasm. "Sure one with a great big city pension. See ya tomorrow."

He got to thinking after she'd left, about how she loved her father and how much that loyalty mattered to him. And then more inappropriately about her small lithe body in some plunging black evening wear.

He gave himself a mental slap.

All of these thoughts were very bad.

They felt like so many shades of wrong.

**_She's your partner for God's sake._**

But Robert Goren was a man of thought. And when questions arose very few of them were ever mild or modest or non-confrontational. And so with a few more facts in place he started to build a profile. No, not a profile (too stark) a portrait.

A portrait of Alexandra Eames.

* * *

><p>"<em>Jesus Bobby<em>."

He kind of loved it when she said those words, with that Eamesian ring of exasperation. Only her voice hit that particular level of annoyance and it was in pitch that only he could hear kind of like a dog whistle. "You couldn't figure out a less slasher movie way to get the point across. We all about lost our lunches."

He leaned casually against the counter of the MCS kitchenette and cradled his throbbing hand. She was right he'd gone too far, the pain was a reminder of that.

"Let me see." She demanded, tenderly annoyed. And she grabbed his hand with maybe a little too much energy.

"Ow." he grimaced "Ow."

"Serves you right." And he could tell she meant it because she didn't soften one iota. This wasn't going to be a Florence Nightingale moment. But still, he stopped breathing just a little as she held his palm in hers. Then she examined the open wound with mild disgust, like one might a canker or a problem. Then she dropped it without ceremony as if to silently proclaim **_you'll live_**. "You can't do crap like that."

"Sorry." His lips twitched. "I was in the zone."

"Yeah? Well remind me to watch you don't get in the zone when you're driving or holding a gun."

"Driving? What's driving?" He shot back.

"You're so God damned funny aren't you." She shook her head and moved to the coffee pot "partner's a comedian." He thought he heard her mumble as she poured herself a cup a joe.

"My mother thinks so." He said in jest.

And her shoulders tightened and rose a fraction because she knew his secret now, a big one.

"Don't worry." he caught her discomfort. "Though it may not always seem that way," He rapped on his head then on his chest, "sound mind and sound body."

"I wasn't worried." She shot back a little irritated that she'd flinched, so his mother was a schizophrenic, so what.

"Look she's in an institution, I call her everyday. I visit like a good son should. I make sure all is right in her malfunctioning universe. It works for us." He smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile. All he ended up doing was showcasing his new straight, pearly, even, grill.

"Okay, okay," She snarked "now tone it down I'm getting singed over here by your bioluminescent teeth."

"Bioluminescence could never singe you and it could never be a generated by the composite resin in these veneers. Bioluminescence is a pretty much relegated to bacteria, fungi…."

"Oh shut up Bill Nye." She gave him a disgusted look stirring her steaming mug absently and then she turned to go. She stopped just before the door and turned back and added almost shyly. "I like your new smile. It's great. Really great."

He actually blushed.


	9. Chapter 9

**BADGE**

"Which means he was tipped off Tuesday or Wednesday morning."

"Which means the leak is coming from somewhere in this building." Goren said, pulling up a chair beside his partner. They were finding that Randolph their suspect had long arms, she was always one step ahead, pulling favours high and low throughout the department to cover her tracks.

"I checked who the requisition went to in the Chief of Detectives office, besides of course the Chief of Detectives." Eames continued.

"Well I can vouch for his assistant." Goren said quietly though it was the last thing he wanted to cop to.

"Denise? You dog!" Her tone was outrageously chipper and Alex barely spared him another thought before picking up the phone and moving on. "Yeah I'd like to check on requisition number…."

This was how they communicated. He watched her on the phone. Her thin shiny lips moving quickly, her skin pale against the black handset. This was how he told her he was dating. More then dating. Denise had been in his apartment on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, they had woken up together after a night of intense sex. He had screwed her like he was trying to screw the demons out. He didn't have any problems getting it up for Denise, with her tight little ass and that _mouth_, she was willing to put it anywhere. But Denise was getting attached. And he wasn't. It was almost time to cut and run.

_**Don't shit where you eat.**_

A less then delicate way of saying office affairs never went down well. At least he was separated from Denise by a few layers of bureaucracy but what about Eames? _**Carver!**_ That was dangerous. That was everyday. _He was married._ What in the fuck was she thinking? Goren was dying to know. He waited for her to reciprocate. He waited for her to maybe give him a clue that she had ended it with Carver. He waited for her to slip it into casual conversation as was their way.

He waited.

And he waited.

And he waited.

* * *

><p>"My partner's a miser and I'm frugal and neither of us could afford a house with a mortgage and two kids in private school…" Bobby shot at out in his hammy Canarsie cadence. Again Alex stood back and watched him go from the doorway, this doorway was to the kitchen of a single family home in Brooklyn Heights. On the sofa sat their suspect and her mother. the latter looked frail and shell shocked, the former looked tense and scrappy.<p>

"You're not that frugal." Randolph finally burst out gesturing with anger. "You buy nice clothes, pay full price, nothing in your size is ever on sale. You buy good quality accessories like that leather case. You're not married so you spend money on dates. You like good food, you have someone in to clean your apartment every week. You're smart, you have lots of interests and hobbies and you spend a fortune on them. I don't wonder that you don't have money for a house, I wonder how you make subway fare the way you spend money."

_**BAM!**_ Alex thought,_** Profiler profiled.**_

_And how!_

Despite the fact that Terry Randolph was a murderer, Alex felt her gut do a happy dance. She knew it was horrible to feel such joy at Bobby's takedown - she was after all still on the side of right and good and rule of law. But as she watched Bobby's act falter, his brow drop and his face take on that 'just slapped' look, Alex felt like singing an impromptu aria.

Suddenly his regular soft reedy tone was back, all of his artifice was gone. "Uh… a… that's very good Randolph. But you didn't answer my question." He fell to one knee and went for the cheap shot, the fretful older woman. "How can she afford private school? Where does the money come from?"

This whole trip to the Cluster Sargeant's home was a rig, a game, a racket. They were here to put her on edge and plant a little misinformation in her ear. But first came the Goren show in full effect. Only, Alex thought, this time maybe he'd laid it on a little too thick because Terry Randolph had the chops. She had been repeatedly denied the detective promotion before leaving for the school security division. So it was it any wonder that the big, bold, clownish portion of Goren's shtick had been quickly unravelled under the shrewd eye of a cop turned criminal?

Maybe, Alex thought, Randolph might not have gone down that dark lawless road if she hadn't been a woman struggling to make it in a man's world. They were here to bring Randolph down Alex was good with that, but maybe this would also bring Bobby down just a few precious notches.

Alex couldn't help but think he needed it.

A little comeuppance.

And moreover she'd needed to see it happen.

Alex had needed to see Bobby in all the ways she had over this last 11 months of hard graft - as sharp, as cocky, as belligerent, as absurd but also as kind, as generous, as caring, as thoughtful. She'd needed to see 360 degrees of Robert Goren.

She'd needed it, so that she could tear up her new partner request (which oddly had still been sitting in Deakins' 'to do' pile).

The fight was over.

They were in this together now.

It was time to see where this Goren and Eames thing could really go.

* * *

><p><strong><em>Season 1 finis<em>**


	10. Chapter 10

**Thanks for reading. I feared it would be hard to write over the holiday season and I was right. Parties and travel and distractions oh my. I hope the quality doesn't suffer. As always I am enjoying your reviews. There were a few questions in them so I'll answer whether they were rhetorical or not. First, Carver and Eames, I'll use them as a plot device for as long as I need to. Sorry to those who dislike the pairing but it isn't my objective to make all of the characters likeable just layered. "Rampaging" someone took issue with it in relation to feminism. All I can say is that if the word sounded judgey it probably was, though not intentionally. I can't promise impartiality. I'm not a journalist everything I write is proudly biased. And yes, to someone else, I am going to keep writing for as long as I have the stamina, hopefully it takes me to season 10.**

* * *

><p><strong><span>Season 2<span>**

**ANTI-THESIS**

This wasn't like the 23 odd other cases they'd worked together.

It was a good thing Alex had withdrawn her request because this debacle at Hudson University might have spooked her into running it through.

Two words: creepy, blonde.

Alex watched Bobby and Elizabeth move around each other in disgusting mating ritual. Phase one: fascination.

**_Okay relax he's just lulling her, he's reeling her in._**

In the last 12 and a half months Alex had unclenched around Goren. The quirks were even becoming less annoying, but this devious blonde had gotten her back (and everything else) right up. Maybe it took an impartial woman to see through another woman because the moment she'd shaken hands with Elizabeth Hitchens Alex had smelled the stink of manipulation. How glamorous she was, how cultured, _how cultivated. **It's all a dog and pony show.**_ Like the rich, Hitchens reeked of image and like the over-educated she oozed condescension. But there was something more. Alex squinted and tried to remember where she had seen it before.

Then she had it.

The alligator enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. That was where she'd seen the same dark shiny gaze perfectly mirroring humanity. That was how Alex saw this untenured visiting professor. There was nothing behind those eyes. The reptilian brain run amok.

In the livingroom of that highrise with a skyline that went on for miles Alex had tried to get into her partner's line of sight. She'd tried to grab Bobby's focus time and again, she'd tried to share their 'what a lot of bullshit' glance because they had loaded glances now, glances that contained complete conversations. She'd gotten goose egg for her efforts.

Her partner was intrigued, that was plain as day.

And since this was new territory and since Alex had never seen him fascinated by a perp before, she thought it best to broach the thing head on.

"You like her." She head butted him with her truth as Wallace's sublet receded in their rearview mirror. "Watch yourself."

He didn't say a word, he just sat there staring out the window.

"Did you hear me?" She demanded because timid, Alexandra Eames was not.

"I can handle myself." He barked.

"Yes you can. Just don't let yourself be handled."

* * *

><p>It was the oddest thing. For some reason this woman made Alex feel like dishwater. This criminal had charisma. This criminal had a certain je ne sais quoi. Why was evil always so successful in it's presentation? In it's pursuits? <strong><em>Because it needs to coax the little children to eat the poisoned sweets, because it needs a host of starry eyed idiots to plant the bomb.<em>**

Bobby was different on this case. He was distracted, he was preoccupied, he was riddling and puzzling his mensa guts out. He was back to old habits, running off again. Alex would turn to find he had wandered off in _her_ direction. Elizabeth Hitchens. His desertion fit like a familiar pair of woollen socks. Alex was _finally_ used to being an afterthought to her partner's passions. Bobby had never shielded her from the full scope of his personality. From day one he had been in full effect. Alex couldn't say the same was true for herself. This was their first case with honesty.

"Bit old to be auditing a course aren't you." She walked the rope of intensity and humour so effortlessly. He had caught up with her in the 1PP cafeteria sitting on an orange plastic chair sipping a coffee.

"It was good. Hitchens likes to play. She likes to match wits."

"What did you get?" Alex demanded.

"She hates men."

"How do you figure?"

"Moby Dick is man's pursuit of his own potency." His lips twitched. "A valid assessment but somehow I don't think she meant humankind in the broader sense. She was digging at me at all of us unfortunate Y chromosomes."

"Get anything more relevant to the Dean's murder and less about her beautiful mind?" Alex's voice was laced with venom.

"She hates Mark Bailey even more. It's clear she has nothing but disdain for his weaknesses."

"Well he is the poster boy for insipid and she likes her men nice and exploitable." _**In fact s****_he'd _love a cop in her pocket.**_

He turned and zeroed in on her for the first time in days. He had _neglected_ her for days while selfishly relishing the hunt. He heard her unspoken meaning but like most with a strong IQ and a thready EQ he said exactly the wrong thing.

"Jealous?"

Alex felt red all over. "Jealous of what? Her face? Her mind? Her station?"

"I was thinking you were jealous of my fascination."

"Don't flatter yourself." She looked like she'd drunk some bad milk. "If that's where this is going, if you're romantically interested in a suspect, _this suspect,_ then you need your head checked. Maybe your mind and body _aren't_ all that sound." When she was vicious she was vicious. They would be finding little chunks of him scattered all over New York when she was through.

"Is that where this is going to go? Everytime I do something you don't like you're going to insinuate that I'm as crazy as my mother? That's beneath you."

"No this is beneath you." She gestured broadly. Then immediately lowered her voice and glanced around.

"What? Solving a case?" And his own faux innocence weighed heavy on him.

"Just remember you have a partner." It was an epic warning that would resonate with him long beyond that moment.

Their year of kid gloves and secret dissatisfaction was over. He'd told Deakins that they couldn't be candid, how he longed for those halcyon days! _**This is all part of it**_ he reminded himself. If he wanted her he was going to have to take all of her. Including the part that made personal judgements, including the parts that tore him a new one.

He sighed deep and gusty and tried this novel honesty on for size. "Full disclosure. She's pretty. She's unbalanced. She's smart. That's what I think. That's all I think." He said looking straight into her eyes. "I'm not dumb or smitten enough to forget our objectives here."

Alex was surprised at how much his words stung.

_**What is it about them that stings?**_

She examined her own emotions very closely for the very first time, unbelievable as that was. For a year of partnership she had shunned any impulse to delve into Robert Goren's humanity. He was an aid, like a calculator or a search engine. But now the sheer volume of unleashed emotion threatened to swamp her. The door had been unbolted and the barnyard animals were coming and going as they pleased.

_**Why the hell did she care?**_

For over 12 months she hadn't felt so much as a twinge at his behaviours. She knew of his dalliances at work. The grapevine had authenticated that he'd dated at least 4 women at 1PP. And Alex hadn't cared one iota. _**That's not true and you know it.**_ A voice floated up and smacked her down. Okay, okay, it had annoyed her, but in the way of a fly that won't stop circling your head because his conquests seemed perfectly chosen for maximum nuisance. Goren's ladies filled out bail paperwork, they fetched evidence, they answered the Chief of D's office line, they processed payroll in HR. His conquests were everywhere.

"Pretty, smart" Alex reamed off, "Sounds like a good foundation for you."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You've gone a lot farther for a lot less." Her true feelings bled through. In Alex's opinion Denise Atkins, Bobby's latest fling, was a complete moron. Alex had butted heads with her many times. Denise was the gatekeeper of all the data in the CODs office and she ran the place like a petty little fiefdom, revoking passwords and generating paper for no reason except to her inflate her importance. But still Alex couldn't believe what she'd intimated. It was so out of bounds. It was so bitchy. It was the hallmark of too much emotional involvement. "I'm sorry." She apologized immediately. "Nothing you do off the job is any of my business. I'm sorry." She said again.

But he wasn't sorry. In fact it was the best thing she'd ever said to him. Instead of lashing out he sat back like the cat that'd eaten the canary. She missed the look of supreme satisfaction that passed over his face. He was buoyed by an idea,

Alex cared.

She _really cared._

* * *

><p>"Nicole Wallace killed the real Elizabeth Hitchens, applied for a passport in her name and went off to Oxford."<p>

"This woman's very very good." Goren pressed hands to his mouth. And Alex heard it in his tone, 2 parts horror and 1 part grudging admiration.

Deakins left them alone to strategize and Alex strode wordlessly into a one of the offices, her pace a little quicker her footfall heavier then need be. He followed.

"Tell me now." She demanded in their glass cubicle, "Are you going to take her down or ask her on a date?"

"Ask her on a…" He crowed spinning indelicately away. No spun, he was spun by the energy of her words, spun on some invisible axis.

"She's veeeeery very good." Alex mocked with a hint of lechery.

He guffawed.

"I heard it and if I did then so did Deakins."

"This is a new side of you Eames." He sat on the edge of the metal table. "I think I like it."

She shook her head in annoyance. "This is the side that has your back. You know, your back? The thing that has gone uncovered for so long because you pissed off so many partners. But this," She gestured between them "_this bond_, is as important as getting the killers."

That made him pause.

Was he mistaking her duty and friendship for more? Eames had unwittingly hit _his_ weakness. She unwittingly uncovered the spot where Robert Goren had many a crisis of confidence. His own relationships. He wondered often if he had an attachment disorder. So consumed by the abstract problems of strangers but thoroughly confused about the real, invested parties all around him. He blamed his father. Walter hadn't given him the gift of ease or comfort or a healthy masculine version intimacy. He hadn't given him anything that a man owed to his son. And because Bobby had picked up his lessons on the mean street and from his ire-filled, deranged mother. He was never at ease with his own emotion.

The rolling hills and valleys on his brow were making her seasick. She softened.

"Look, let's just get her. _Let's get her._"

He nodded.

* * *

><p>The lights were dim in the squad room. Security lighting and desk lamps cast shadows over the piles of files and general clutter. Bobby leaned back in his chair as deep as he dared go without toppling over.<p>

"She knows me." He muttered. He was tortured but for the first time he shared it. He looked up and into the eyes of someone who understood.

"She doesn't know you." Alex scoffed "She knows your social security number. Don't give her more power then she has." Alex went back to writing. Scribbling post case summaries inside white text boxes. The end was in sight. The case was still open, no definitive resolution, tons of supposition but with Bailey dead and no confession, well… It was the first case they hadn't closed.

She looked at her partner. He was staring at a filing cabinet, at a picture of La Joya's kid to be exact. The boy held in permanent 7 year old stasis by a smiley face magnet. The whole side of the cabinet was a mess of personal sentiment. It made the days go easier.

Alex immediately knew It was the failure as much as the psycho that had him this way.

"Where do you think she is?" He asked.

"In a hotel on 5th eating caviar."

He flipped to look at her, "Really?"

"Yeah. She won't run. And she won't compromise her standards. She's nothing but shit rolled in diamonds."

He laughed. His partner had a way with words. Then he sobered,

"She'll be back." He said, and unfortunately Alex agreed.

"She'll be back."


	11. Chapter 11

**BEST DEFENSE**

JoJo Martinez sat beside his lawyer in a sad grey room at Rikers. There were shades of Christ in his features, shades of the devil in his disposition and shades of an Andean herder in his woolen South American garb. The last was draped over his unfashionable orange prison jumpsuit.

_**Peru must be so proud.**_ Alex snarked silently.

"They're playing you. Gary Burke is dead." Martinez snapped at his lawyer.

"How do you know that?" Alex shot out.

"PNN - Prison News Network." JoJo sat back with the smarmy look of someone on higher ground.

"That's the same place we get our news from." Bobby chimed in. "One of their _reporters_ heard you a couple of weeks ago putting out a contract on Bonham."

"S- s- s screw that." The prisoner stuttered. "Why would I want to hurt that man?"

Goren turned to his partner and as he did his eye hung on Carver's arm. The lawyer's limb had ventured out and bridged the gap between his chair and Eames'. Eames who was sitting quietly_ over there_ beside the ADA instead of standing in solidarity (and rhetoric) with her partner. Robert Goren read bodies like books, that was an alpha move, that arm was territorial. Oh it was meant to seem innocuous, a perch for a weary limb but it had layers of meaning. Subliminally it showed protection, sympathy, attraction. And in the same instance Goren saw that Eames leaned in. She actually leaned in. **_What the hell was this? They were being sloppy. Were they getting serious?_** Goren (barely) managed to stay focused on JoJo the thug. Ever present in his mind, in his periphery, was Carver claiming mastery over Eames and her chair again and again and again.

"Because he's about to put you away for life." Eames got in the game." You're facing your third felony drug conviction."

And Carver backed her up like a partner, "Bonham told us he turned you down for a plea bargain."

Bobby roiled.

**_Do I even need to be here?_** He was starting to feel like a third wheel on his own case.

By the time JoJo had stomped off, their fingers (Carver's and Eames') rested inches apart on the table top. Goren's heart rate spiked and he knew that it had nothing to do with this criminal or this case.

He was grappling with the basest of human emotions.

He was jealous.

By the time the accused's lawyer left as well Goren was feeling hot and uncomfortable. He was nothing more then a big body without bounds. He immediately seized the high ground. He shunned the 3 empty chairs, planted his butt on the tabletop and gazed down on the couple. In psychological vernacular this was called peacocking: making himself bigger, unavoidable, obvious. And he hated that. He hated that he was doing it and hated even more that _he knew_ he was doing it. He was no better then any other jealous loser.

"It begs the question where is Mr. Martinez getting the money to pay for better representation." Carver asked looking up, _his arm still on her chair._

"Same place Gary Burke got his money?" Eames suggested blissfully unaware of the silent power play storming about her.

"Jojo's mom might know." Goren replied looking deeply, inscrutably into the pages of his portfolio.

He couldn't take much more of this crap.

* * *

><p>And so it seemed ingenious and perfectly right that two days later Goren and Eames started their collusion. They sat at their desks and he sold her on the merit of excluding Carver from the rest of this case. This was about a corrupt ADA after all, a man with all of the rights and access of every ADA. They couldn't risk giving him their case through Carver or through the District Attorneys Office intranet. They needed to move together in secret. Bobby took great pleasure in convincing Eames to deceive her lover.<p>

"Avoid him, it's the only way." He told her with schooled innocence. "Let Deakins do his briefings until we can bring ADA Bonham down." Goren fully intended for that takedown to take at least a week. A week of late nights and ordering in food with Eames. _A Carver free week._

Her brow furrowed.

He imagined her mentally cancelling their date for tonight (and many nights after). And he was struck by waves of pure pleasure. Goren knew he shouldn't be so fuckin' happy, but he was. A perfect storm. And so he took Alex by the hand and lead her away from Ronald Carver.

* * *

><p>Carver swung in on the door frame surveying their little 1PP paper party. The detectives sat tucked into a table pouring over mounds of files. Ron hadn't seen Alex in a week. He was here under the guise of the Bonham case but really because he had the jones, the love jones. His lawyer personna looked expectantly at the detectives while primal man looked longingly at Alex.<p>

But she was clipped and short and all about the case. Her professionalism hurt him.

"Martinez said he got $20,000 to arrange the hit on Peter Bonham, we just need to trace it to Linda Bonham." She gestured at all their open files.

"Just dotting all the i's." Goren added .

Carver's inclined ear heard a ring of smugness in those words. He looked from Goren to Eames then to Goren again and a wave of futility washed over him "Let me know what you come up with." He said then vanished into the squad room.

"How long are we keeping him in the dark?" Eames asked and the conflict was there in her eyes. Carver was twice as invested as usual in this case, which meant he was twice as aggressive in his phone calls and pop bys. It was stressful for her. Two worlds were colliding, work and sex were catching up in the worst way.

"As soon as we have an incontrovertible case against Peter Bonham. Starting with tracing the $20,000 back to him" Goren was a broken record out loud but inside he said things like: _**Suck on that Carver**_ and once (even more surprising)_** She's mine**_. It'd taken a glass of Glenlivet to wash that particular thought down, to reconcile his deep possessiveness with their platonic relationship.

Their conspiracy was delicious. Watching her snub Carver was delicious. It wasn't often that a device threw itself so cleanly in Goren's lap. It wasn't often that he played the wedge so legitimately.

Because he cared. Deeply.

He had her back.

Ronald Carver needed to go.

* * *

><p>"We're all going for drinks, live a little," Bobby cajoled at quitting time. Partly because he wanted his eye on 'off hours' Eames, partly because they needed to become joiners. They both had lone wolf tendencies.<p>

"Who all is going?" She tidied her desk.

"Stoke, Jeffries, Luftisa, Goldblat, Donovan and a few girls from HR."

She caught his eye. "Oh, now I see what's in it for you."

He lowered his head a little, she read it as bashful. But then gave her his softest look "Come on." he urged.

And she did, come on that was. She dragged her heels all the way down to the shiny marble lobby of 1PP and then 2 blocks over (by foot) to "Flannigans' a cop bar if ever there was one. The atmosphere was 'any weeknight' stuff. Low lighting, a jukebox cranking out retro tunes - the 80's mostly. A lot of guys whose butts probably hadn't fit on a barstool since the 80's, darts, pool and a thick crowd - standing room only.

"Let me buy you a drink." She felt Goren's hot breath on her cheek and it was an odd comfort. This was not her natural habitat.

"No. I'll give you some cash."

He shrugged. And she dug deep into her purse for some money and came up with a ten. "Get me a margarita."

He smirked.

"What? It has to be beer?" She stepped to him scrappily, "What I need a whiskey to be hard enough?"

"No, no." Goren smiled "Just let me see if this guy even knows what a margarita is." He turned and elbowed himself a spot at the bar.

Alex slowly looked around the room and the crew they came with waved her in. They sat at two '4 seaters' slapped haphazardly together. On one side was a long red pleather banquet the other side a line of chairs. _**Oh God**_ she groaned this was going to be tight. 8 seats for 10 people. All she wanted was a cup of tea, her couch and some footie pajamas. Being smushed up against Bobby's last administrative conquest was not her idea of a fun night out.

"Squeeze in here detective." Jeffries called from the booth side, _**small mercies**_ Alex thought. She actually liked Jefferies. She shimmied in. This was the truth about offices, but moreover about policing, it lived and died by camaraderie. Their Major hazing had never really ended, it probably never would. Rookies (which she and Bobby still were, as the last arrivals) couldn't just abruptly withdraw from interaction, they had to be joiners. They had to network. So Alex nestled in against her co-worker's thigh panning the throngs for Bobby.

"I hear you're in the bad books." Donovan launched in right away yelling a little over the noise.

Alex leaned in to show interest, then saw her partner on the periphery. Two drinks in hand with no seat, she supposed he could shimmy in on the end beside her, let his long legs hang into the aisle.

"Hey Bobby!" Susanna called trumping her, Alex glared, Susanna Voigt of HR fame. "I'll sit on your knee." The woman was obviously joking (and judging by the extra button she'd undone on her satin blouse) also not. Alex couldn't believe it when Bobby set her margarita down with only a cursory glance and turned to the auburn haired vixen.

"If the offer's good let's do it."

The whole table erupted and that started a round of banging and cat calling and urging until Alex watched that Human Resources slut stand, blush and then plop her ample derriere into the centre of her partner's lap. Accounts on that may have varied: on the size of Susanna's behind and her proclivity for the opposite sex. It was quite possible that the light was a little more unforgiving from Alex's place at the table.

They all watched Bobby adjust those lap dancing hips suggestively. _**Should we leave you perverts alone.** _Alex went on a tear inside her head. Until at last she couldn't bear another second of her own hostility. She turned sharply to Donovan.

"Bad books?" she picked up an old conversation.

"With Deakins."

"Oh yeah he'll get over it, we're already creating our next wave of enemies." She quipped. Everyone at this table knew the score. Bobby was a stone in the shoe of the brass. Their big victories came with big risks and even bigger fallout.

"How you doin' under there partner?" Alex asked with a very merry falsetto. Then she slammed back her drink, she was going to need a few more of these.

Susanna swiveled grinding on him. "He's just great." Her voice had layers of innuendo.

Everyone snickered because they all got it but Goldblat just had to cross the finish line. "Got wood Goren?" He asked to ruckus approval.

And that was how it went after hours, someone got blitzed, someone got punched and someone got laid. Emotions ran the gamut and in this world they were always on high.

"Get a room," Alex heckled just to keep up with the Joneses, even though she wanted to get a room, her bedroom far from this maddening crowd. Far from her horny partner. Far from her stinging jealousy.

Her cell rang.

She glanced down.

Carver. **_Shit._**

If he wasn't currently public enemy number one she might have worked out some of this tension with him.

Or maybe not.

She hit the 'end' button because she was starting to see that Ron was a means to an end.

She was using him.

He was a crutch. A bad habit she was ready to break.

Alex deliberately turned her body away from Bobby's inappropriate tableau and looked straight into Detective Chris Donovan's eyes. He wasn't half bad - tallish, blond, a bit thin but that certainly wasn't a deal breaker

"Let's dance." she commanded.

He looked around. "No one else is dancing."

"Ya chicken?" Alex asked with a light in her eye and a suggestive twist of her lips, because he liked her and she knew it. She could feel Bobby's eyes on them. She spared him a glance and watched his jaw clench. Donovan took that challenge to his manhood and grabbed her hand. He lead her away. Alex gratefully put 5 tables and 17 drunks between her and Bobby then she curled onto her co-worker (maybe a little too close) but she was feeling reckless tonight.

Her partner was making her crazy.

* * *

><p>A couple of hours later the floor was littered with peanut shells and fragile egos. Wives and boyfriends had started calling errant partners home. Pissed patrons paired off, pitching and lurching toward the door and the bar's population started to thin, save a handful of hardcores and regulars.<p>

Alex couldn't believe she was still here.

She'd danced a bit, drank a bit and generally lost track of time and now she'd tucked herself into a tiny two seater in the corner and debated the luxury of taxi all the way to Queens.

"Hey there."

She looked up _way up_ into Bobby's eyes.

"Oh. You're still here. Shouldn't you be in Susanna's pants right about now?" Too much drink. She was being loose with her words. "Sorry." She slurred a little. "Shouldn't have said that."

"Come on partner." He smiled down, "Let's share a cab."

"I'm fine here." She let her head rest against the faded doodle of a labia on a 'seen better days' wall.

"You can't sleep in the bar."

Bobby thought she looked small and pretty there, her jacket shed, the strong thin slant of her shoulders glowing under a knockoff Tiffany ceiling lamp.

"I'm not gonna sleep in the bar." She screwed up her face but made no move.

"You are such a cheap drunk." He laughed filing that important knowledge away.

"I resent that. I'm five foot nothing and I drank 5 margaritas." She held up 5 diminutive fingers.

"What?!" Clearly Donovan had wanted to get lucky. He would kill that sonofabitch. Bobby took her arm and got her to her feet and out the door, piling on layers of autumn gear as they went. Outside in the unseasonable cold and bluster they stood shivering, tucked into the crook of several hundred glowing office buildings that truly never slept. He flagged a cab on that street and once they settled into the vehicle her phone rang.

Carver, again.

This time Bobby saw.

This time, in the tight midnight hue of the backseat it was impossible to hide the neon green box screaming the ADA's name.

"Carver." he said.

"Carver." she repeated.

"Bit late for case talk." His sharp tone belied the dull warmth of his body an inch away.

She shrugged and let her head fall back. In the moonlight he tracked the sweep of her pale exposed neck.

"You haven't told him about Bonham?"

"I said I wouldn't. I don't sabotage cases." Alex had all but quit Ronald Carver, save two booty calls in the last two months. She didn't have any lingering emotion, but still it was hard to deliberately keep him out of the loop.

All of her private considerations must have played cryptically across her eyes because when she finally looked at Bobby he wasn't leaning back, he wasn't mirroring her easy late night stuporous pose, he was _so invested_. He looked like he was trying to pry back her skull with a mental retractor. He looked like he was trying to delve into her mind.

She looked at him with quizzical eyes. There was no way Bobby suspected, she told herself. She and Ron had covered. They'd barely been within touching distance ever.

His next words let her know how wrong she was.

"You have to quit him." Bobby said abruptly. And all of the air rushed out of the cabin with a hiss.

"Pardon me?"

"You heard me."

"I can't believe what I heard."

"Well let me spell it out." The double scotch neat and 3 beers he'd had were making him just as loose with his words. Maybe too loose for such a delicate conversation. "You have to stop fuck-ing Carver." He annunciated.

**_Holy shit._ **Alex was reeling. She pulled up straight, the haze gone, her mouth slack.

"Maybe you need to mind your own _fuck-ing_ business." She mimicked him in tone and intensity her cheeks went flush and it wasn't from the margaritas. There wasn't a margarita in the world that could make her head whirl this way.

"You are my business." his voice was brash and unrepentant.

"Did you hear me say a word when you were screwing around with Denise? Hickey's above the collar? Really Goren? Or what about tonight? Letting Susanna ride you like something at the carnival?"

"So you noticed." His eyes narrowed on her. "I wondered if you'd noticed."

"I have more class then to call you out." She hit low.

"Yeah well Carver is in our faces at least 4 days a week. I can't deal with that much sexual tension in one room anymore. Figure out your loyalties!"

Alex felt like she'd been transported to another dimension. The one with a crazed jealous Goren, who wasn't her work partner at all, suddenly he was her boyfriend or her husband.

"Figure out yours!" She shot. "You think you can bang any skirt that casts a shadow over our desks and then call me out for easing my ache!" Wow. This was getting dirty. This was going somewhere that was over 13 months in the making.

"Are you working your way through the office alphabet? Donovan? Really? Cs are done so tonight it's onto Ds. I guess I won't have to wait too long…" He bit out and immediately regretted what he'd just revealed.

"Wait? Ha! What a joke." She lampooned him "You're too busy to _wait_ for me. You have a new lay for every day of the week."

And it was that simple phrase that cast the light of realization cast over her.

No wonder she'd wanted to escape him.

Almost from the moment she'd met him she had been clawing and scratching and pushing him away.

Alex wasn't used to being so obtuse about her own feelings. But she had feelings. _Did she ever._ There was no mistaking _that_ now and he definitely had feelings too.

"If you'd said something, showed even the slightest interest maybe I wouldn't have..." He fired out. "But you were too busy on your knees for Carver, weren't you?"

They both sat back at angles to each other, panting like they'd run a marathon.

The staring took on ridiculous proportions. The staring carried them through six Bollywood ballads and 25 miles.

"We shouldn't be doing this." She said at last, the whites of his eyes flickered like a Super 8 with each passing street light.

"What coming clean?"

"No, going out together." **_Ever again._**

"Scared?" He taunted. "You've tried mean, you've tried to get away, you tried to butch it up" He parted and clipped a section of her short hair between two long fingers, this was the shortest her hair had ever been "and I still want you." His fingers on her scalp were heavy and warm. She almost purred with the simple pleasure of being touched by him.

It was all so honest.

So intimate.

She wanted to stay. She wanted to flee. But she drew the line at doing a tuck and roll on the interstate. So instead she pulled away and made her face as hard as that asphalt.

He seized her hand in his, he need to touch her. "That's it," he mocked softly, "Game face on, that's how you do it in the bullpen, don't let the brass see it."

"What?"

"How much we want each other." He said.

"How much you want me you mean." It was a vicious hail mary, a hope in hell that she could stop what was happening here.

He leaned in.

He smelled like alcohol. So did she.

**_Oh God, he's going to kiss me._ **She couldn't fake indifference in a kiss.

But he didn't. Instead he touched her hair again. This time tucking a short errant lock behind her ear smoothing, caressing.

"Nice try." He was completely unphased by her cruelty. He got her game, especially tonight when her tricks were so booze laced and facile.

They sat for so long in that simple pose.

Until their cheeks collapsed wearily against the seat.

Until his hand felt as though it had grown fixed to her head.

Their eyes locked.

Their bodies curved toward.

Their knees rubbed.

Their mouths sighed.

It was so simple, it was so complicated.

They rolled to a stop in front of her apartment door.

He moved closer. His breath was hot on her lips. He whispered "When you're done with him, we'll both get what we want."

And then he let her go.


	12. Chapter 12

Bonham's day of reckoning arrived and too swiftly by Bobby's calculation.

Just when he and Alex had made a breakthrough, when he could almost taste her it was time to reintroduce the competition.

And so Goren, Eames, ADA Bonham and Carver found themselves all packed into an office. It felt like a Beetle full of clowns - too tight, too many 'costumes'. Goren was pacing like a panther. He was ready to reveal all. Ready for the takedown.

"Well you showed her didn't you." Goren taunted Bonham. Yes the big cop taunted but he also watched, he watched Carver squirm uncomfortably, cross and uncross his legs as realization dawned as his underling was shown for the insecure, weasley, half-man he was. And Goren relished. Zeroed in as the scales fell from Caver's eyes. He watched emotion twitch in the man's brow, cheeks, mouth. He watched the lawyer silently question his own powers of observation, he watched the lawyer count the ways in which his own ignorance made him culpable in Bonham's crime.

Then it came, the look Goren had waited for a sharp slice of the head in his direction.

Ronald Carver new exactly who had conducted this takedown. Goren was the one with all the 'tricks' after all. Bobby felt pleasure shoot through him like an intravenous drug. If it was a flaw of character to rejoice at another's distress then he was an unrepentantly imperfect man. Goren met Carver's gaze and didn't waver.

"Peter Bonham you're under arrest." Alex came in smoothly with the bracelets.

And Ron looked from one cop to the other seeing himself now as the fool so vividly. And in the big detective he read the subtext of this take down, her name was Alexandra Eames. Goren had a thing for Eames.

**_Well played. I'd never have guessed, about any of it._**

"How long had you suspected?" Carver asked the detectives once Bonham had been led away.

"Only a few days we couldn't take the risk of him finding out." Goren explained playing fast and loose with the truth.

"Please no explanations," Carver's voice seared. "First I've got to deal with Peter Bonham. But _I will_ get back to you detective." The odour of flesh hung heavy in that office.

The lines were drawn that day.

Carver cast a betrayed look at Eames and then fell in behind his disgrace ADA.

"He'll get over it," Alex quipped easily, "Just like Peter Bonham."

Goren wasn't so sure.


	13. Chapter 13

**THE PILGRIM**

The weather turned. It went from hot greens to cool reds, oranges and yellows. Nature's paradox. A paradox deepened by the understanding that this leafy vibrant vision of loveliness came only in the throes of death. Soon the fruit fell away and the whole city seemed greyer, darker, foreboding somehow. Wondering. Waiting. For what? That remained unclear. This year the seasonal cycles offered no reassurance. The colour left every year didn't it? Everything always cooled. This year it felt like a harbinger. Even the old oaks of Central Park prayed, great brown sticks reaching for heaven. There was an edge to this Autumn.

The political climate changed too. The world was a powder keg and their city - iconic, dense, diverse - seemed an irresistible bullseye. Bobby and Alex lost track of themselves, their personal dramas, their meals, their homes, their beds, even their hygiene - judging from unsightly translucent rings beneath the arms of their white button ups. This case was just too important. 10, 15, 18 hour days, lying fetally on cramped cots in the barracks of 1PP, trying desperately to crest that peak into the land of nod but to no avail. They would all sleep when they were dead.

It started with the disappearance of Leslie Dornan, then it went cyber with a modern match making tool and soon like a pyroclastic cloud it had swept menacingly across jurisdictional lines and infiltrated all layers of government. This case was a matter of national security. There were no shortage of big questions or big considerations during the two weeks leading up to Veteran's day that year in New York City.

Everything was white noise to these detectives. Everything was a distant second in favour of the grander themes of humanity: life and death and justice (of course) but also the relationship between everyday people and God.

Alex watched Bobby with unrestrained interest. Like the leaves he was suddenly technicolour. After the taxi, after their night of honesty he looked different. Everything was different. Things were changing inside her. She fought them but she understood the scope of her own femininity. She was softening, she was listing toward him, she was unaccountably interested in everything he had to say. She was falling. And worse she felt every sweet second of that free fall and didn't give a shit about the looming pavement below.

She caught his eye over Deakins and he caught hers and they held a long illicit gaze.

Then later at their desks;

"Stop staring at me!" She said exasperated not even looking up from her work. His gaze was that hot.

"How do you know I'm staring at you?" He countered with hushed sass.

"I can feel you."

"I'd like to feel you." _Oh, the layers of innuendo!_ But not explicit, never explicit.

"Bobby!" She chastised her voice a strained whisper.

"Your eyes." He said, "I meant your eyes."

And she gave him what he wanted. She let her amber orbs sweep over his curly hair and down to the hollows of his cheeks, she traced his cupid's bow and then full sweep of his lower lip. She panned over the stubbled granite of his chin and down the column of his neck. She let her head flow from left to right to encompass the breadth of his shoulders and then stopped in the centre of his chest. She tried not to imagine him bare and failed. In her minds eye he was, hard, gritty but also pulsing and warm. She winced when the cold slap of the desk prevented her from seeing more.

"Did you feel it?" She asked then cheekily meeting his chocolate stare. This was more daring then she'd ever been with him.

"Yeah, I felt it." And there was a new hoarseness in his voice. "Eyes above the table." he quipped rawly.

And she understood.

* * *

><p>The case. For the first time Alex realized exactly how screwed they would all be without Goren. He was an endless font of knowledge. She would never <em>tell him<em> that mind you, she would never contribute to the expansion of that head. He knew he was good. But even he probably didn't realize how good. This case was like a love letter from Deakins. When it morphed from a simple murder into a terrorist plot it became clear that Goren and Eames were his first stringers.

"The feds and the joint task force are going to be all over this." Deakins warned.

"You're not suggesting that we bow out?" Goren reeked of disbelief.

"Hell no. We got a suspected homicide to clear." Unspoken was _**you go out there and kick some ass.**_

So they did. As always Alex moved and rolled in tandem with Bobby. They were the grease and axle of a massive machine when they had a mission. But sometimes, _sometimes_ his unique pockets of literacy were just so relevant_ and so vital_, that she stood back proudly and let him go and go and go. She let him take centre stage, without envy or fear because she was learning that Bobby always came back to her. She was learning that his insights had no value unless he could look into her eyes and see them validated.

She always gave him what he needed.

And he always made her feel powerful.

It was better then sex.

Almost.

Alex supposed Ron was right. Bobby was esoteric and she was perspicuous and that was exactly why they were on fire.

The things Alex learned, saw, felt 'that time they saved New York' (as they casually referred to the Edwards case ever after) would help solidify her feelings about Bobby forever.

XxXxXxXxXxX

"Go ahead impress me."

"It's Aramaic, the language that Christ spoke in and parts of the old testament were written in it, but don't ask me what it means." He grabbed the coat rack and casually tilted it out from the wall, gesturing a small framed work, "This is Aramaic too."

XxXxXxXxXxX

Eames cued up a Singular Singles pitch video, "This is the boyfriend Ali El Javad." They watched a clean cut young middle eastern man fill the screen.

"Uh he's not Moroccan. When Moroccans speak english they sound French I'd put this guy further east." Goren tossed off hand.

"How about we put him in this seat." Came the sweet reductive tones of Jimmy Deakins.

XxXxXxXxXxX

"What's this?"

"It's the Smithsonian article on the new library in Alexandria. When Edwards mentioned smoke detectors it didn't ring a bell."

"You actually read this when it came out." She interjected incredulously.

"The magazine is the perfect size for my treadmill. There's nothing in here about smoke detectors. Since there's no reason Edwards would mention a detail like that…"

"He's been to Egypt in the last year." She picked up what he was putting down.

"The state department would know." He grabbed the phone victoriously.

XxXxXxXxXxX

Goren flipped out his ready switchblade and fished a small toxic ball from the seam of the wooden table. "Uh this is not good. It's rat poison. Rat poison is an anticoagulant. Suicide bombers in Israel they use them to mix with shrapnel when making bombs, the idea is when their victims are wounded they bleed to death."

XxXxXxXxXxX

"You know, I read the Quran a long time ago when I was in the Army. I was stationed in Germany and there was this girl who lived near the base, she was Turkish, she was Muslim, I wanted to impress her. And yo- you know it really isn't what you'd expect. They recognize the right for women to vote to own and inherit property to divorce their husbands and this was what? Written 1300 years ago." Goren held the room spellbound, specifically a stoic federal agent who hadn't given a New York City cop much credit.

XxXxXxXxXxX

Alex tried to put all of it in perspective, their tipsy conversation in the back of that cab, their growing closeness her newfound appreciation for him but there was no distance, no long view to take, they were there day after day pressed up close to one another and every move was riveting.

His hands were graceful and his long fingers flexed and folded.

She watched his mouth for those puffs of profundity and she would feel her breath catch and quicken.

It was too late to turn back now.

* * *

><p>Bobby was spellbound.<p>

He was obsessed with Eames. _Alex._ Eames.

She was right there with him, as focused as he'd ever seen her. And she was… she was... beautiful. She looked fit and fine and… She was different. He was fixated, he was a born obsessive. He wondered (he hoped) her changes, embracing femininity was a consequence of no more Ron. A consequence of wanting him. Maybe she was feeling liberated, marketable, lighter. Eames was doing all the little things women did to bring on fresh attention, touchable hair and exposed flesh. Bring on the tank tops. Bobby had almost gone to Deakins and requested one of those comical courses for the whole 11th floor on appropriate work attire. His eyes kept hanging on the weight of her breasts outlined in cotton.

He didn't think she was seeing Carver. He didn't think that this was Carver's revenge. But imagine if it was. To flaunt her to drive him crazy. No. That was crazy. Eames could never be so easily manipulated. And Carver had been pretty scarce during this case, especially considering how high profile it was, no doubt he was nursing secret grudges. Alex played it close to the vest. She was an expert secret keeper. He couldn't know for sure what was happening between her and the ADA.

And Bobby had another problem. Every cogent thought was now hijacked by a single sentiment:**_ I want her._**

He never shouldn't have said anything.

His words in the back of that taxi had unleashed hell and heaven.

He cursed own his tongue.

Every lean, every whisper… torture.

Eames whispered a lot. She stole into the interrogation room to feed ideas directly into his ear. Once she'd sidled up, let her lips brush the side of his face and whispered.

"Nice job."

It was all part of the mind game, the elaborate ruse that broke a suspect. She did it to break the perp. She almost broke her partner.

And he realized this woman just might be perfect for him because Eames just got it. All of it.

"I was sent by God!" Their misguided extremist yelled.

"So were we." She shot back without missing a beat and that's how it felt to Bobby. The way it all came together was divine. The way they clicked was blessed. This case exposed the best of them. It showcased them to each other, to the brass, the feds. It set a precedent in their partnership. Ever after they trusted each other professionally unequivocally, even when they didn't. It felt good. It was a heady kind of power to align with someone so precisely and to adopt a new motto: My partner right or wrong.

All of their residual doubts and holes and annoyances (were still there) masked from the world under a thick blanket of unity.

* * *

><p>The door opened slowly on a wedge of light. Bobby saw her unmistakable silhouette.<p>

"You grabbing some shut eye?" His disembodied voice floated up in the dark room.

"Bobby?" She closed the heavy metal door. "I thought you went home." She rested against the surface turning a flushed cheek for cool relief.

"No. I feel asleep in the AV room. There's a circle on my forehead right where it was resting against the jog dial."

Her laugh was light and tired.

"But of course now I can't sleep." He rumbled.

"That's how it goes." She couldn't think of anything better to say. "I'm going to head home then." She said. She had wanted to be alone, but also not. She'd thought the bunks would be the perfect solution.

"No." His refusal was sharp. "You're too tired. We can share the room." There was more then one bed after all.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"I promise to behave." She heard the springs of his cot creak loudly. She wondered if he was just shifting or sitting. "Eames I will never do anything you don't want me to do."

But that wasn't it at all.

She wasn't worried about her virtue.

She just wanted to be alone with her emotions, with her turmoil. "I can.. I can't stay…" She whispered clutching the door handle suddenly as her left knee gave way.

His senses were heightened in the dark. He sprung up so fast that his head struck the metal cross bar with a tinny thud.

"Ow. Shit. Eames? Eames?" He asked trying to see her in the dark, so frustrated by his limitations.

"I _need_ to be alone." Again that wobble. It was an unmistakable sign of weakness that didn't jog at all with the woman he knew.

"What's wrong? Tell me. Did... Did he…"

"No, no... It's not about that..." She sniffled.

"What?"

"I.. I can't Bobby." She murmured low and soft and sad, so sad, unlike anything he'd ever heard.

He stood and moved in front of her and ran two big palms down those bare soft arms, the same ones he'd been coveting all day.

"Leave me alone Goren."

"No. Never." He was so strong in contrast. "Lie down with me."

"Get away from me." Some of her fight was back, she broke free of his grip.

"I'm not taking advantage." He cooed like a lullaby. "You're my friend. We're friends right? Finally?"

"Yeah."

"Then?" He steered her leaden feet over to the small bed.

"We can't do this here Bobby. Someone will come in and…"

"I locked it."

"You can't lock it." Her voice was husky. "That's worse then leaving it open."

"They can fuck off." He said so firmly in the dark, that it put her in mind of a taxi ride from not long ago.

"You have a foul mouth Goren."

"When the occasion warrants." He pushed her toward cot.

"No funny business." She shot out but it sounded like a swift wind could blow her over.

"None." It was a firm promise.

She climbed onto the low creaky thing thinking all the while that the NYPD could do better. They had $750,000 dollar paper budget yet they had detectives napping on a glorified bed roll laid over old springs. She immediately snatched up the only pillow and hugged it to her chest. Wondering what the hell she was doing.

Temporary insanity.

Today of all days she was entitled.

His big body came down and dipped the metal frame so low she feared it would give.

"We're gonna end up on the floor you oaf." Her words were muffled in her security pillow and he was glad to hear some spunk.

"Let me get this…" he ripped the pillow away on her squeal. "Out of the way."

"No touching!" She roared. "Stay on your side."

"Eames."

"Stay on your side. Stay on your side." she repeated like safe words again and again.

So he did. He left that old familiar inch between them and whispered. "What happened? Tell me."

"Family stuff." Her voice cracked.

"Tell me please."

"My," She whispered. "My mother died today."

"Oh God." And the tone of his voice was honest. She felt his shudder. As if that, losing a mother - his mother? her mother? - was the worse thing he could imagine. "Oh God Eames." He rushed out again "Let me take you home, let me take you to your family."

"It's, Itsokay." The words slurred with emotion. "I was there. I'm back because I need this. I need to be somewhere else."

And he felt his face heat, his eyes gloss and he was suddenly thankful for the for the secrecy of jet blackness. He was going to cry, actually cry in empathy, and in fear too maybe, because he'd always felt like his own mother was on borrowed time. He always felt that Frances Goren was so strong but she was also so vulnerable. To lose her...

"God Eames." He said again because there were no words really.

He thought of Alex taking it from life. Being asked to accept loss after loss and soldier on. Literally. Face blank, stance wide don't let them see you sweat. Everyday they were soldiers for the NYPD. Who would love her? Who would take care of her? Who would tell her not to go in today? Who would make her a hot meal? Who would hold her? _**Where the fuck are you Carver, huh? Where the fucking goddamn hell are you?**_ Bobby wanted someone to help bear the burden of her grief. He wanted help in that small dark bed. Then he shook it loose, the clawing hysteria, the ridiculous weakness and manned up.

There was only him.

He put his hands on her.

She pulled back.

He was undeterred.

"What are you do…"

"Eames this is a very bad day and I'm going to…" **_hold you_ **those words fell off the edge of a cliff as he pulled her in. She fit into the dent of his chest with yards to spare.

"Don't tell anyone." She whispered around tears. "Don't tell them I was such a mess."

"You only have one mother." His own voice broke. "Cry your heart out. No one will ever know." He pressed his lips to the top of her head, burrowing into her unbelievably soft hair. He found that night in the dark that the illusions were gone. She wasn't hard or tough or superwoman at all, she was the softest most supple little thing and his arms could have gone around her twice over.

* * *

><p>They buried her mom on a Saturday. The crowd was large, Barbara Eames was much beloved. Alex stood stoically, feet planted firmly before a mound freshly turned earth. He was there behind her. At one point his large heavy palm curved round her sagging shoulder. She didn't cry. She already had.<p>

They where honoured by the department that Monday. They walked up to the podium in their dress blues. They where adorned with matching citation bars, for Excellent Police Duty. Their chests boasted the green, the gold and the white. They posed for photos together. Between them an engraved plaque said: _For honour, for valour, for going above and beyond the call of duty._

A door closed.

A window opened.


	14. Chapter 14

Snow.

Glorious snow.

Fluttering down onto the tips of a noses.

Sheeting onto windshields like vicious cotton balls.

It kind of sucked when it snowed in the city. Maneuvering a big black bug down slick, shopper-clogged streets required more then finesse it required guts of steel. But Alex was up to the task because **_YAY! Snow!_**

She loved walking (driving, standing) in a winter wonderland. She loved the way the feathery white coating smoothed away the harsh edges and made everything so light and bright and _clean. _She loved that snow made fierce, clomping, prada-clad women with their smooth corporate up dos suddenly turn into ballerina's gliding gingerly on their toes with crystals glinting on their coats like stardust. She loved that snow transformed the street vendors' clapboard capitalist huts into ice oases, their awnings piled with white and strung with fairy lights.

Alex loved the breadth and width Park Avenue with it's strand of elms running straight up the centre median, each one ensleeved from tip to root in blue twinkle. She loved the historical facades of the old hotels facing The Park, each now roped in thick furry garlands of green, ruby red ribbon and heavy golden balls barely clinging for their weight. Maybe they were real gold. _**God knew they could afford it**_. She loved the brisk blizzard that blew through the promenade outside FAO Schwarz. It was a winter wind tunnel. Natives and tourists alike turned up their collars, slid on their gloves and went into battle, marching a thousand deep on a mission for the latest hot plush toy.

It was beautiful.

The chaos.

The choreography.

The avarice.

Her city was beautiful under a mantle of new fallen snow.

1PP found the spirit. A towering 20 foot pine sat in the vestibule. The lobby was strung with traditional silver and gold. And every hour on the hour the loudspeakers reinforced that design choice, floating down the resonant voice of Burl Ives.

11 storeys up there wasn't any music, but in the bullpen spirits were merrier then usual. A red mug peaked out from behind a stack of binders, a mini christmas tree adorned the top of a gun locker, a santa hat sat proud on a once humbug head. Donovan, Detective Chris Donovan, was clearly a Christmas-phile with his snow globe and a silver garland taped to the perimetre of his desk. Alex couldn't resist a comment.

"I like your spirit." She marched up and told him fingering the shimmering pom poms.

"I haven't even put out the pièce de résistance." He smiled and magicked a beer stein full of mini candy canes from beneath his desk. "Go ahead have one. I know you want to."

She laughed. He was fun. He was totally wrong for her in every way. But she couldn't deny he was fun.

"You're right I do." She unwrapped the little striped confection and popped the tail into her mouth, letting the crook hang out and scrape her chin. It was the sugar, she'd always had a sweet tooth.

"Plans over the season?" He asked.

"Well fingers crossed we don't catch one." She and Bobby had been caseless for 3 days now. With Christmas still 7 days away it seemed like a pipe dream but one could always hope.

"Are you going to the party?" The annual One Police Plaza fete would be held at the Chromium Banquet Hall at the top of Seaforth Tower. This was the first year that the organizing committee had voted to have it off-site, they said it was due to a space conflict in the conference hall on the mezzanine. The whole thing, the prospect of a party, _a real ball_, was the source of great twitters of excitement especially in administrative circles. The Chromium was uncharacteristically upmarket for the NYPD. Alex had never heard so much talk about a Christmas party in her life, let alone an office Christmas party.

"Yeah, that's the plan. Can't say no to the Chromium can we?" She rolled her eyes for good measure, so he knew she wasn't a bimbo who's life was governed by the promise of an evening out.

"So. You have a date?" He kind of mumbled it into his daytimer giving her a view of the blond whorl of his crown and the rouge of his scalp. Which Alex thought was sweet, his head was blushing, his voice was so nervous. She considered his loaded question. It was totally unacceptable to date a detective. Dancing after a long day (while tipsy) was one thing, this was another entirely.

"No I was thinking I'd go solo." She looked over her shoulder to see who was watching.

Bobby, that's who.

His gaze was hot on her back. And it spurred her on, it pushed her closer to this slightly goofy blond Detective, because Bobby (or rather her _constant_ awareness of him) was becoming a problem for her.

"Don't do that. Don't go alone." Donovan looked up now. "Go with me… uh us…"

"Us?" That peaked her interest. A date was intense, a group was better. She glanced again subtly at her partner. Still watching.

"Jefferies and Jill, Goldblatt and his wife, Sever, me. We're renting a limo."

"You flatfoots are getting uppity." She laughed.

"Hey it's black tie. When was the last time you threw on a ball gown?"

"Prom." She laughed again. Aware that she'd been standing there for 10 minutes yucking it up. The pace in the bullpen was slower during the holiday season, but not comatose. She needed to get back to work, she needed ward off speculation. Cops loved speculation. But Alex realized in the same instant that Chris was very easy to talk to. Standing there she'd forgotten herself. She hadn't done that in weeks. The realization made her spontaneous.

"Sure. Count me in, I'll go with you... or … uh … the group."

"With me." He shot out so quickly that she lost her balance and had to use a booted toe to keep steady.

"Okay."

"Okay." His smile was big and genuine.

In the aftermath she all but ran for the kitchenette. Usually empty, with it's warm cups of watery brew, it was the only place to restore her equilibrium. Had she really just committed to a date with Chris Donovan? She was losing it. Where in the hell was that scrappy Vice detective that wasn't going to be brought down by man or mistake or innuendo? Suddenly she was banging the ADA, cuddling with her partner, dating her peers. That Alex wouldn't even know this Alex.

_**It's stress, it's grief.**_

The voice was right on both counts. Escapism. A bid for control. Pure recklessness. She'd done it all before. She'd been promoted from patrol to detective. She'd lost her husband. She'd almost resigned after Joe. She'd actually turned in her badge in a moment of hysterical grief, only her dad and her old captain knew that. Like a seasoned profiler Alex saw her own patterns. She loathed them but accepted them.

**_This is natural._**

She gave herself a pass while clutching a brown paper cup in both hands.

* * *

><p>She was going with Donovan.<p>

If it wasn't fucking Carver, it was fucking Donovan.

And he hated this fucking bowtie too (his head was far fouler then his mouth these days).

Bobby squinted at his reflection. _**Black tie for a bunch of cops.** _He rolled his eyes at the guy in the mirror and they glowered at each other for a good long while. He'd rented this tux from a specialty store (that last 4 inches screwed him every time). He took small pleasure in imagining the pandemonium that had occurred inside Tuxedo Royale a block from 1PP, cops never went home. He imagined them all clamouring for appointments and fittings and smiled the smile of the malcontent. Sometimes being in the big and tall category had it's benefits. _**Losers.**_

He was in some kind of mood.

He blamed his partner.

Bobby adjusted his bowtie and smoothed a few wiry hairs down with some pomade. He tried to imagine all of the guys at Major Case doing what he was doing right now, primping and preening. He rolled his eyes again. _**Those meatheads? This was wasted on them.**_ All they needed was a keg and permission to burp.

Yes he was grousing. And yes he was going (_**oh he was going alright!**_) he'd jumped through every hoop to attend this event because he needed to keep an eye on Eames. He needed to make sure his partner didn't _grieve_ all over that opportunist Chris Donovan.

_**Liar.**_

"I'm not lying!" He actually barked that aloud in some kind of power struggle with his own psyche. _**Watch it Goren there might be a bit of crazy Frances in you yet.**_ Yes, he did want to protect Eames but he also wanted to see her, and dance with her, and do a million other inappropriate things to her. _**Good the whole truth. **_Laid bare on the witness stand inside the court of his cranium. Genuis was exhausting.

Unfortunately there was also the issue of Melissa. Melissa Hyler. He'd needed a date. He couldn't just go skulk around the party alone and moon pathetically over Eames. Especially since he knew she was having a spa day. He knew she was going in a limo. Bobby huffed. In a limo with _him,_ Donovan. He huffed again. Bobby needed to bring his A-game. His date, Melissa worked in accounts receivables on the 5th floor. No more Denise. Denise was stalking him. Denise was borderline. He couldn't deal with Denise's level of crazy right now. When it came to crazy his cup runneth over. Bobby just needed a fresh start with a girl who wouldn't forget her place.

_**Misogynist pig.**_

Not her place like the kitchen, her place as an acquaintance - _just an acquaintance -_ as a _casual companion_ not a future wife. Denise wanted a husband. And Robert Goren was pretty sure he was never going to be anyone's husband. He grabbed his overcoat sending the hanger skittering across the floor. He snatched up his car keys and bolted through the front door moving as fast as he could away from his chattering mind.

This was going to be an interesting evening.

And long.

Very very long.

* * *

><p>Okay, so it was nice.<p>

The venue was nice.

Really nice.

Spectacular even.

Chromium sat perched atop a skyscraper. It was a giant cube with soaring 30 foot ceilings and modern architectural detail - natural wood and steel and exposed beams. Around the perimetre at 4 foot intervals, sat soft glowing up lighters and a large customized banner welcoming the dedicated police officers and staff of One Police Plaza. The tables (a hundred at least) were like large polka dots in festive silver and ice blue - 12 seats to a round. Each one was worthy of a royal wedding, with a pin-spotted centrepiece - a large christmas orb on a simple stem. The dance floor was so glossy it might have been fibreglass.

Like all the new arrivals before them Bobby and Melissa paused in the entry looking all around completely bedazzled.

"Look up." His date gestured enthusiastically. The ceiling was strung with a canopy of twinkling lights, row upon row upon row. It looked like a loom waiting for an artist. There was a junk art chandelier dead centre, roughly the size of Bobby's apartment. The skyline glittered in the distance only a thin barrier of glass and away. What views! The top of the Rock had nothing on this.

_**Okay so maybe black tie wasn't out of order.** _Bobby admitted. Maybe a better question was who the hell was footing the bill? You could bet he'd be eagle eyeing all of the lines of his paycheck for large mysterious deductions.

He looked at his date. Melissa was cute with her auburn hair, emerald green dress and natural good humor. It was the latter he liked the most. They were on the same emotionally tepid page. He smiled down at her, but not as far down as usual. She was 5'8" (even more with heels). He took her hand in his and cut through crowds looking for their table _**and for Eames** _he silently admitted.

Then he saw her across a crowded room.

And like a romantic movie or a sappy ballad time seemed to stop.

And the band hit crescendo.

And the caterers parted.

And she was illuminated.

Unfortunately he also got a clear view of her date, Donovan. The man was curved around her like an insipid pashmina. Donovan looked so proud to have her on his arm because _she was naked!_

_**No not naked idiot.**_

It was just a trick of the eye. Her dress was like skin, a dewy sparkling skin. And it hugged every inch of her shaply body right down to the floor. **_Well not every inch._** It plunged deep between her breasts and it soared high up her thigh. Bobby felt his cock stir.

_**Shit.**_

He looked at Melissa again for camouflage, then back at Eames. Had Eames had that much hair this morning? She seemed to be simply cascading with hair. **_Damn you women and your beauty tricks._ **She had it rolled into a full touchable chignon with long tendrils caressing her neck and cheeks.

"She's beautiful." Melissa whispered pulling him from his reverie.

_**Shit.**_

"Yes she is, but she has nothing on you." He threw his date a lustful look which wasn't hard (visual transference and all).

"It's okay." She smiled warmly, she reached up and cupped his cheek and spoke in low tones "I like you Bobby. You're hot. You're smart. You're perfectly weird. And you're in love with your partner."

"I'm not…" His blood ran icy. If he was that obvious they were screwed.

Melissa pulled him low. She slid her small cool fingers around the back of his neck and guided him down. She tucked her lips into his ear "It's okay. Your secret is safe with me. The NYPD needs to mind their own business when it comes to our love lives. Let's make her jealous."

"Melissa…" he was stern now, deadly serious.

"Relax gorgeous." And this time _she_ took _his_ hand and brought him face to face with his partner.

"Bobby." Alex took him in, then his date.

"Eames." He nodded shortly. Up close she smelled like vanilla and winter - or what he imagined winter smelled like: bracing and woodsy. Up close Alex was even prettier her cheekbones and eyelids were shimmering. The mounds of her breasts peeked free of her plunging gown. Could a man drown in just the thought of cleavage?

Bobby pulled free of his sexual spiral "Donovan." he nodded curtly.

"This is some spread." The lanky blond offered.

"I know amazing isn't it." Melissa chimed in.

"I saw a memo last week." Alex said cynically, and she had (quite accidentally) seen a sheet sitting proud of all the clutter on Jimmy Deakins' desk. She'd kept the contents to herself but there was no harm in letting the cat out now. "The Chief of D's, the Commissioner, the Mayor are all on the guest list. This spread is all for the big guns. Lowest crime rates in a decade everyone is riding high."

Melissa shrugged, "Does it matter? This is awesome! However it came, I'll take it." She laughed and Alex felt old and grizzled compared to Bobby's girl. She was so optimistic and bright eyed. _**Bitch. **_The word came unbidden and Alex felt instantly ashamed.

The conversation came easy for this small group. Thanks mostly to the dates, Goren and Eames were characteristically mum. It was during their long silences that Alex realized how alike she and Bobby were. Both content to survey and assess. Later during the soup course she looked him up and down slyly from behind the leaves of her kale salad. He stole her breath. He was so dapper, so James Bond in his tux. It fit perfectly. She bit the inside of her lip hard. _**Think of the pain. Think of the pain.** _It was no use. With his dark good looks Alex could finally see him for who he truly was, beautiful.

This was so dangerous.

This thing they were playing at could ruin them. Besides Bobby's little green firecracker seemed to be keeping him nice and happy, her hands had hardly left his body all night. Alex tried not to shoot daggers and death stars at Melissa Hyler but she might have failed.

_**It's natural to be possessive**_. She only wanted what was best for him. But the monster inside fed on those lies and grew as green as Melissa's gown.

"How is A/R these days." Alex asked trying to achieve polite not catty.

"Ah it's a stopgap." Melissa smiled "I'm working on my MBA at Stern."

"NYU my alma mater." Alex offered. _**Ugh, a point of connection.**_ She didn't want to like the woman.

"Really? Criminal Justice?"

"That would have made sense wouldn't it?" Alex shook her head, "I was late to this game. I'm a math and computer science undergrad."

"So you…"

"Got my Criminal Justice degree correspondence from St. John's" A statement which set the ladies on a trajectory of (but not limited to) the conveniences and nightmares of obtaining an online degree, while the men played with their food and sagged into their palms with boredom.

After rounds of food and speeches and a raffle, came the dancing. Movement of any kind was very welcomed by atrophied muscles and distended tummies of all the guests. Soon you couldn't see the dance floor for bodies.

"Chris let's dance." Alex implored playing to her femininity, batting her eyes, touching his hand. It wasn't hard in this dress. She felt sexy, she felt like a vixen. She wanted Bobby jealous, she wanted him eaten up with desire for her. She wanted payback for his touchy feely date. It worked and then some. When Alex stood all gamine and lithe his breath caught. Then she turned and revealed the back of her dress to be MIA. Bobby watch her hips sway and fine line of her spine until he couldn't see for the throngs.

"I think I have a girl crush. Melissa whispered "She's the whole package isn't she?"

He looked into his date's impish eyes, still not prepared to take her on as a confidant. Instead like a gentleman he offered his hand, "May I have this dance?"

"Why yes you may kind sir." She giggled back.

Out there on the sprung hardwood dance floor it was war, a war of intimacy, flirtation and showboating. Goren's hand fell to the small of his Melissa's back and Alex retaliated by pushing closer to Chris. Goren nestled into his date's hair so Eames stroked her date's chest. All the while their eyes stayed fused. All the while pursed lips passed angry threats.

It wasn't until the lights went low then suddenly magenta that the ohhs and ahhs and really bad behaviour began. It was the worst mix of an open bar and high threshold.

It was Goren that initiated the dance partner swap. He'd had enough of these games. He wanted to feel Alex against him.

"May I cut in?" He asked smoothly, then clasped her hand and lead her away from a bereft Detective Donovan. Then he pulled her close, closer then he ever would have dared under high incandescent lights. The shadows allowed him to run an index finger down the small of her bare back. He felt her shiver.

"I don't like him." Bobby said immediately.

"Who?"

"Donovan."

"Or Carver." She teased.

"Or Carver." He agreed and let his lips brush her ear.

"Hmmmm, strange. All they have in common is me." She raised her face to challenge him.

"Good deduction detective, but they're also both men."

"I agree, men suck."

"You are such a smart ass."

"Thanks." She grinned.

Suddenly he sobered "You look hot tonight."

"You've had too much to drink." Her tone was serious and censorious.

"I just ate a 4 course meal, with 2 glasses of wine. " He tightened his grip. "That dress is painted on." He whispered.

"Don't do this." She straightened away from him self consciously.

"Don't let him touch you."

"Which him? I'm getting deja vu Goren."

"Any hims. All hims!" He said a little too loudly during a particularly mellow bridge.

"Keep your voice down." Alex whispered harshly.

"Do you want to be the 1PP slut?" He fired.

"If we weren't surrounded by narcs right now, I would knock you out." She said between clenched teeth pushing away from him.

"I'm sorry." He bit out close to her ear. "I'm sorry. I'm… I'm jealous." He felt both lame and liberated.

"God Bobby. What are we doing here?"

"Dancing?"

"You know what I mean."

"Playing with fire." He admitted. "Getting burned."

She sighed and her warm gusty breath lingered on his neck made him stir.

"I want… I want…" He danced her slowly to a darker corner, he danced her until he couldn't see a familiar face in the crowd. "I want to be with you."

"We can't." Her heart sang. But she refused to give in.

"You want it too." He spun her back to the wall and let an intrepid hand slide low over her rear. He squeezed. "Tell me."

"You have a date."

"I have a decoy." He retorted.

Alex felt flushed and tingly and she wanted nothing more then to puddle all over him.

"Tell me." He demanded again his his other hand joining the first cupping her ass and getting her good and close.

"I want you." She said at last. Blame it on the twinkle, blame it on the music, blame it on the press of their bodies and the rush of feeling beautiful and desired.

Or maybe, just maybe she was falling in love.

"Tonight." He urged. "Come home with me tonight."

"I can't Chris."

His voice was sinister "Forget Chris. Fuck Chris." She peered around his big body. No one was looking at them, everyone was lost in their own moment. She couldn't see their dates anywhere on the horizon. And she thought. _**He's right. Bobby is right. We have something. This connection is once in a lifetime stuff** _and Alexandra Eames didn't think mystical things like that lightly. She'd had her once in a lifetime, with her college sweetheart a lifetime ago. Or so she'd thought. But Bobby was so intense. Bobby was a force. From the second she'd met him she'd known it was all or nothing.

"Okay." She said.

"Okay?" He sounded giddy. He whirled her around in fantastic fashion lifting her off her feet (which did earn them a look or two).

"But I have to leave with the man who brought me." She was firm about that.

"Eame…" She pressed a manicured finger to his lips.

"No. I'm taking the limo. You know where I live." She teased.

That he did.

That he did.

* * *

><p>There was once something written about the best laid plans.<p>

Probably also with star-crossed lovers such as these.

That tale had a bittersweet conclusion too.

As the clock chimed 12 that night it had a rush of company. A series of pagers tucked deep into tuxedo pockets and bejeweled clutches tweeted and beeped along like backup singers. And a man and woman dressed to the nines looked wistfully at each other across a beautifully appointed table.

Deakins materialized like the Ghost of Christmas yet to come.

"It a big one. Governor's niece, a dead body and 15lbs of heroin. Get home, get changed, the address is on your device." He looked down at his detectives and took a deep breath(alizer) "Either of you too blitzed to catalogue a crime scene?" He panned from Goren to Eames to Goren again.

"We can do it." Came two people with one voice.

* * *

><p><span><em><strong>Four Days Later<strong>_

The cab of the Yukon was a cold place to spend Christmas Eve. But so be it. They were there watching the front door of a thug named Emil Ramos, praying he would do his dirty deal and let them take him out so they could salvage what was left of this 'holiday.'

"Eames about the other night…" Goren started.

"Let's just forget it happened." She never moved her eyes from the handle of that front door.

"_That_ will _never_ happen."

"It was the wine, the clothes the atmosphere. Look at us now." It was true, there was no glamour here with hats, mitts, scarves in place, sitting under a pile of mismatched blankets: some pilling and threadbare (his) others lush (hers) all from their home linen closets, all so they didn't have to run the engine in 30 degree weather.

It was hard to remember looking so beautiful.

"Look at the time." He showed her his cell.

"11:59." They both stared as it ticked over to 12.

"It's Christmas."

She looked at him now, full in the eye. "Merry Christmas Bobby."

"Merry Christmas Eames. Alex."

They held a long meaningful gaze.

"I'm sorry you're not with your mom." She said looking through the glass again because the words felt like a sucker punch.

"I'm sorry you aren't with yours." He sighed.

"I am, sort of, I guess." She said sadly. And just then it started to snow. "Dammit we'll never see him in this and we can't use the wipers."

"I have something for you." Bobby said suddenly.

"You do?"

"Uh huh." He pulled out a leather bound box.

"Bobby. No." Boxes like that came with price tags.

"Yes." He popped open the lid to expose a fine filigreed gold watch.

"Are you kidding me?" She shook her head "This must have cost a mint."

"Once upon a time maybe I've never had it appraised. It was a gift. I got it when I was stationed abroad. I had it engraved for you. Don't worry it's sentimental more then anything. It was just collecting dust. I want you to have it."

She gave him a look both wary and wistful, then she took it from him and turned it over. It said:

_**It's all about the timing. Love Bobby**_

She smiled softly afraid to look up. "Do you Bobby? Do you love me?"

He didn't answer. Not directly. "We're in this. We're family."

She liked that. She nodded. Family.

And she had a flash in that moment. This was love. Not the basic yearnings of sexual frustration (though there was that) no, the transcendent kind. She could feel him inside, in her heart. Maybe it was the Christmas spirit, maybe it was the culmination of the last 15 months, maybe it was fancy that would fade in the harsh light of day. Who knew. In this tight cabin, under a mound of blankets with the Christmas snow falling around them it felt magical.

"Put it on me then." She pulled off her glove and held out her left wrist. He took it gently and pressed his mouth there, not to her hand but to the protrusion of that bone, that angular hinge where his gift would sit. She inhaled sharply and felt warm lips replaced by the cool caress of metal she heard a the click of the clasp as he claimed her.

Then outside there was movement.

Then headlights.

Then their doors flung open.

Then their feet crunched in fresh fallen snow.

Then there was a chase.

And then they got their man.

She had the bracelets, he had Miranda, a perfect team.

They walked back to the SUV sometime later.

"Top ten Christmas?" He murmured to her. His breath was a puff of smoke, icy fluff clung to his hat and coat and lashes.

"Top 5 at least."


	15. Chapter 15

**SHANDEH**

This case was about sex pure and simple.

Very little of it for infantile Danny Sussman. Ample 'portions' for Bobby and Alex served up on an aging strippers collapsing balconette. Even the perp, Big Louie was getting his knob polished nice and regular by an African American amazon aptly named Starr (her afro and near Goren stature did seem pretty astronomical to Alex.)

Of course it had started off innocuously enough. The bat signal had gone up and they'd responded because it was murder and they were the 'special' murder beat. They'd arrived separately at an affluent suburban household and found a dark family tragedy (like most of their cases). Devout, scrubbed, simple Kelly Sussman had never made it out of her mini-van. And her kids had seen her there, Alex shook her head, stolen innocence.

As she and Goren tumbled through this case they soon found that innocence was in short supply all over. Less then 24 hours into murk and mire it became undeniable that there was a raging sub-plot here. Sex. Sexual drives. Sexual inadequacies.

This case was about sex impure and complicated.

* * *

><p>The law of the state of New York? More like the law of the jungle.<p>

It was mating season and the primates where getting restless.

Was it any wonder that all this _free range_ _sexual energy_ had take root in the lead detectives?

**_That had to be it_** Alex thought because she was feeling anxious, restless, _bothered_.

_**Murder cases can't spread lust. There's nothing sexy about murder.**_

Okay then, maybe it was that time of the month. That time when a woman looked around the world of men with more then just casual interest. A time when biological imperative beat out _breed, breed, breed, breed_ like a drum. A little voice debunked her theory and offered a new one. **_Or m__**aybe** it's denial. It's not just a river in Egypt you know, _**her quippy brain informed her. **_It's also secretly longing for a booty call that should have happened after a certain Christmas party._**

Nothing had been the same since that night. It had changed her body chemistry: plus dopamine, plus oxytocin, minus common sense... She went weak kneed at the memories of all of the business that she and Bobby had left unfinished, in the back of taxis, on the dance floor, in the front seat of the SUV.

She looked across the squad room at him, head down, scribbling something on a piece of paper and _the guilt._ She was standing here daydreaming while he was being productive. For her sanity, _for her dignity,_ she shook the spectre of him away and crossed the room with new determination. She sat down smoothly and clenched loose thighs, ignored those puckered nipples.

This was all her biological clock.

Ovulation and this bloody case.

* * *

><p>"Just watch this," Goren murmured to Eames before heading into Interrogation 1. "She's like Samson except her strength is in her breasts."<p>

"No mastectomies." Alex joked. "Too messy."

'Only the figurative kind." He smiled but it was just a lip spasm, it didn't reach his eyes.

She squinted. Was he angry? He seemed angry.

Bobby drew back the heavy grey door and moved slowly toward their suspect. Sandi Tortomassi sat there chin sharply forward, arms crossed in a burgundy... Blouse? That seemed too generous a term for the scrap of patterned fabric that barely corralled the woman's endowments. _**Samson the philistine **_Bobby mused enjoying a little biblical irony.

Alex watched him approach their suspect with what could only be described as raw machismo. Then she watched him reconsider, pull back, pitch his frame at angles to the wall. He'd decided to watch, decided to unnerve. Every suspect had a language this ex-stripper was confident in sexuality but she was neutered by disdain.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you? Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free."

"Why by the cow when you can get the milk for free." His face twisted with revulsion and his head shook, the thought was an anathema.

Tortomassi's bravado seeped out like the stuff from a maliciously punctured condom.

Sensing it wasn't even worth getting comfortable both detectives stood for this take down. They circled her. They made her feel small. They worked her with their devious psychological games. For Alex staying upright was the bulk of her contribution. She was only half in the game. Some days Robert Goren's personality - the sheer volume of his being - seemed to leave precious space in a room for others. Today was one of those days. Alex watched his shirt bunch and ruffle. She zoned on his massive trunk, licked her lips at the sight of biceps suddenly engorged by folded arms. How could she not have realized on day one (the moment Deakins had issued introductions) just how masculine he was?

"Whoa, you really have this little guy under your thumb dontcha?" He leaned down and Alex watched his trousers pulling taut over his backside. "Well I can see why. Must of been some workout you gave him in that big bedroom of yours." Goren's voice lowered to a sultry mocking.

"Sure when the kids weren't around." Tortomassi's voice trembled just a little. _**Hmmmm interesting.**_ The first real falter from this streetwise barely reformed lady of the night(club). A lie. The wobbly body of bullshit always stank in the stark, airtight, cinder and cement of this room. It was all a seasoned detective could do not hold her nose.

This time the truth was a mockery. This woman who oozed sensuality, no not sensuality, she oozed sex, unrefined, brutish, in your face - had kept her chastity with her shy Jewish benefactor. It truly boggled the mind. _**W****as it her stunning conversation?** _Alex snarked to an audience of one. Sussman had risked it all, he'd paid big time, for nothing. Less then nothing.

They looked down on Sandi Tortomassi's busting bosom and bullish nose. She wasn't innocent of much, but she was innocent of this murder.

* * *

><p>And as it happened Sandi's reckoning had nothing on Danny's in this perversion of Grease - minus the purity, love and infectious melodies. Alex followed Bobby into Interrogation 2. Walking behind him. Savouring his density. Strange that, to be aware of the heaviness of someone. The weight of his arms. the heft of his shoulders. She blinked hard and then flexed her lids as if trying to discipline her eyes.<p>

"I can't think." Sussman repeated pathetically. "I can't think."

"You proved that by getting mixed up with some bottled blonde boom boom girl." Eames couldn't resist nasty alliteration and Goren couldn't resist a cackle. One two punch. Goren stared down the mild mannered Kosher foods retailer with an insolent tilt of the head. The suspect sat complete with kippah and a piety that ran generations deep.

"You don't have to tell me I know that. I shamed my family. What was I thinking?"

"It was worth it." Goren crawled up over the tabletop and bent in half, planting gigantic forearms and a big head right in Sussman's face. Alex had long ago shucked her shirt. Hot. She was hot. This was hot. She sat on the table beside him. She wanted to run her hand over his back, she wanted to test the firmness of his rear.

_**Calm the hell down! Think of butterflies and daisies. Think of your 70 year old aunt for fuck's sake!**_

"I bet this girl gave you quite a ride, no wonder you were still making the drive up to Westchester every other morning." He pressed. "Did you go bareback or use a condom?"

"Uh… Condom."

"Did you buy 'em on the way up there or did she keep a box next to the bed?

"She had them."

**_Meek-man._** Eames mocked from her rigid perch on the table top. He was almost childlike in his passivity. No angry barrages, no mind your own business. All the silence, the deference was damning. And Alex sat there every single muscle rigid. She was torn by a natural desire to ridicule the small man and the naughty thoughts about the big one: **_bareback, bareback, bareback…_**

"Really?" Goren went on "That's funny because we searched her room and we didn't find anything. Bathroom either, no condom, no diaphragm, no pills. There goes that blink rate again." He was right. Sussman's eyes were trying to fly away from all this, his lashes flapping up and down like great big wings. "She really kept you going didn't she? For two years. Two years Danny and not once. Right Danny? Not a once."

"It was okay. I didn't mind really." Sussman looked down with all the virility of an eight year old boy.

"_Oh come on!_ What are you made of marble? You were dying for it!" Goren didn't have to reach deep for his indignance. He spoke the truth. This could just as easily been him blowing off in a therapy session. Or to his buddies over a couple of beers. His balls were as blue as little Danny Sussman's.

Alex finally found her voice, she got off the sidelines "And she kept upping the ante a condo for mom, a house for the kids, a strip club for her."

"A dead wife for you."

* * *

><p>Alex dove into the bathroom in the aftermath of that interrogation. Flushed and shvitzing. She felt shame seep in between hot naked thoughts. This wanting was uniquely absurd. Imagine, desiring him so badly after the fight she'd waged to get away. She felt pathetic. She felt needy and so alone in that need.<p>

She clenched a moist brown paper towel and tossed it angrily at the garbage can. She missed an easy rimshot and growled in frustration. _**Everything sucks today!**_ She'd just bent to pick it up when the bathroom door burst open. It flew back on itself and slammed into the wall. She jumped about 10 feet.

"Bobby? What the hell!" She yelled not caring about commotion or clamor or _anything_ because clearly he didn't either. "See that triangle on the door. That's a skirt. And that means WOMEN ONLY."

She tried to muscle past him.

He but instead he hussled her back quickly, unsteadily into a stall and locked the door.

"What the hell?" She said again.

His frame pushed her back into the metal wall. Not the meat and bone of him, just the forcefield of forbidden energy that they'd errected to keep from molesting each other. Every square inch of them was surrounded by a superheated pillow of air. "Have you done it?" He demanded.

"Done what?" She turned her face to his and her lips fell open. If he wanted her right here, right now he wouldn't get an ounce of resistance.

He leaned low and fit the plump of his lip to the valley of hers, still leaving that tantalizing pocket of air between them. "Told Carver it's over."

"I… " She faltered. _**Who? Was he speaking Greek? **_All she could see were his lips.

"I saw you." He bit out between clenched teeth.

"What?"

"I saw you with him this morning. Sitting in his car. I saw him with his hands on you. I saw you kiss him. What the fuck are you playing at?"

_**Shit.**_

"I wasn't kissing him." She denied. Then got up on her toes to peer up over the edge shooting a glance at the sealed bathroom door wondering when some unsuspecting woman with a full bladder would walk in on this forbidden scene.

"I thought this was... I thought we were..." He stopped himself before he revealed too much but he was clearly raw, he was red with rage. He felt entitled to her. He felt like she was his.

"_He_ kissed _me_." She explained because she felt like an adulteress. She felt like he deserved an explanation. "I didn't mean to... I wasn't trying to..." She stopped mid-stutter. She met his laser gaze. Then she squared small shoulders. "No! No! You know what Bobby? It's none of your damn bu…"

"Isn't it?" Both hands slammed into the beige cubicle on either side of her head. He punched with all of his pent up violence. He shook all 7 stalls on their rivets and left a Goren sized impression there in the metal.

She jumped, again. "Calm down."

"No!" He banged again this time. A tap for emphasis.

They stared hotly.

But he didn't touch her. Not once.

He took a few heaving breaths, nostrils flaring like she was red flag and these were the streets of Pamplona. "Was it good-bye? Have you told Carver it's over?"

"N- no. Not yet."

But it was. She and Ron were over. _So over._ But whenever she went to make it final, the words gummed up in her throat. Like this morning in his car. He'd taken her silence as consent.

"Then it's still not right for us." He let his hands drop. He took a step back. "Not yet."

She actually raised a hand to stop him, looped a finger in the between buttons 3 and 4 and felt his undershirt.

"No. _Don't!_" That last word, issued in a whisper, scraped her lips and chin. With that he turned and left.

She stood there alone and quivering and oh_ so frustrated_. And in flash it came full circle.

This case.

_The wanting, _day in and day out, but never having. Alexandra Eames understood the plight of Daniel Sussman.

She understood his silent submission.

She understood his daily irrational sacrifices just for the nearness of her.

She understood it in spades.


	16. Chapter 16

**BAGGAGE**

"I don't think we have anything to say to each other tonight."

"Look I'm sorry." She'd been freezing him out since the bathroom since his emotions had gotten the better of him. Could he really blame her? He'd gone too far. She was making him crazy.

"I think you're pent up."

"Who's fault is that?"

Her surprise was breathy. She clenched the receiver. "Now I'm responsible for... for... clearing your pipes."

He laughed in a very pure way and so did she.

And all grievances were temporarily forgotten because Bobby and Alex were comfortable living here in the Republic of Limbo. Was this friendship? Love? Should they label it? Were they together? Were they seeing other people? Should they even be doing this?

Only one thing was certain, they were ridiculous.

They spent their days rigidly focused on the cases and then he called her every night and unleashed the man. It was a study in disassociation. They were a pair of mental cases with AM and PM personas that needed the anonymity of a telephone to be honest. But on the other hand it was a very smart separation of church and state. How else would this ever work? How else could they keep all their emotional and sexual baggage separate from the job? Alex had to admit that their conversations were akin to must-see TV for her. She made sure to have her fuzzy grey track pants and over sized hoodie on. She'd plop down onto her favourite spot (the section of her couch farthest to the left under the glow of the floor lamp) where her butt had worked a comforting dip in the foam underlay. She made sure to always have a glass of something at hand. A smoothie after a workout, some amber fire on those hard days, an elegant stem of burgundy on other nights (for the anti-oxidants, for the buzz) or a just cup of herbal tea when her lids hung low and she knew she wouldn't make it more then 10 minutes post dial tone.

"Are we weird?" She asked suddenly.

"Yes." He rumbled without hesitation.

"_Bobby._"

"What? We are."

"I mean because we're like robots at work. Then we have this."

"Well, I do have a genetic predisposition toward more then one personality."

She snorted. "Shut up. You're saner then me."

And because she was the most grounded, sensible person he had ever met that simple comment lifted him in ways she would never know.

"No Eames. It's not weird, it's survival." He paused and took a swig.

"What are you having tonight?" She asked.

He turned the bottle and read the shiny silver label "Guinness Premium. You?"

"Red Bull."

"It's 10:30! You expecting company?" He bit.

"I fell asleep the second I got in."

"So now you're drinking Red Bull and sabotaging the rest of the night, for this?" He was smiling, broadly, she could hear his face split.

"Maybe." The admission came on a wave of embarrassment.

"Put down the can of insomnia. Right now. I mean it."

She sighed gustily and he heard a clank. He settled back edging his fingers under the waistband of his pants.

"What are you wearing?"

"Oh my God." Phone sex. He wanted phone sex.

"Eames." He implored.

"Sweats."

"Sexy." He teased. "And under them?"

"Are we really doing this?"

"Why not. We aren't _doing_ anything else." There was a tinge of bitterness.

She stayed silent.

"You know what I want." He said and every square inch of her skin raised. Arousal. They wanted the same damn thing which was why this _avoidance_ was so inexplicable.

"Yeah I know what you want."

There was a lengthy pause. Then she blurted out exactly the most toxic thing.

"Why don't you call one of your girls." It was exactly what she hoped he would n_ever do_. It didn't make an ounce of sense. Maybe it was something about giving voice to fears. Or maybe this was who she was. Alex built walls. She pushed people away. But the words felt like acid on her lips, they made her clutch her chest. The things he brought out scared her to death.

"Is that what you want?" he asked.

_**No! Please no, it's not what I want,**_ instead, "Isn't that what you do?" Bitterness was a river that flowed both ways.

"Not anymore."

"What do you mean?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

"No more substitutes. I'm all in Alex. I'm all in with this, with us."

Shock was a silent line. Shock was held breath. Shock was a tingle between her thighs.

She screwed up her courage and whispered.

"Black lace bra, leopard print bikini briefs."

* * *

><p>Their vic Jenny Sullivan had worked in a boys club before her untimely death. Alex knew a little something about being the odd one out (chromosomally speaking). Walter Tate, an airline employee, was keeping secrets. They agreed to soften him up the best way they knew how. "You play it snarky and I'll be a good old boy." Bobby waggled his eyebrows.<p>

She laughed.

He loved her laugh.

Then they were in that tight cluttered office. It smelled of conveyor belt oil, Cinnabon, cigarettes and depression. And it was just big enough to hold three people and a modern art mosaic of suitcases: plastic and canvas and leather-look. There was a lost soul and rows and rows of lost luggage occupying this office.

"There was a salary bump with that promotion." Alex needled.

"Would have been." Walter Tate's voice had baggage. It rang of resentment he claimed not to have.

"Oh, Man." Goren shook his head, "Instead you got stuck in this little hell hole."

"I don't mind." Tate bit out. "I like the guys."

Goren nodded then he fondled a pack of matches, he read the logo. "Loyalty counts for something. Can I bum a smoke from you? I mean you can smoke in here right?"

The man handed him a cancer stick.

"What do you supervise in here Mr Tate? Lost luggage." Eames got right up under his skin, grating meanly on his open professional wound. The man grimaced.

"Ah don't sweat it, you were just biding your time." Goren soothed and leaned in to light up their Marlboroughs. Both of the men sat back and took a long illicit draw on the their cigarettes finding their happy place for just a moment.

"Indecent Exposure Gentleman's Club we passed that on the way here." Goren zeroed in on the matchbook cover again.

"I didn't notice." Eames growled from the back of the room.

"You guys hang out there?"

"Yeah sometimes."

"Jenny must have felt right at home in a titty bar. Oh right, that's the point she wouldn't, right Walter" Eames picked.

"You know what? We're going to let you get back to your work. Thank you for your help." Then Goren paused and braced on the door frame. "I almost forgot, I once busted a stripper her specialty was this thing with a glowstick. They do that there?"

"Yeah they do that." The man's smile was one part chagrin and one part lechery.

Alex thought of the glowstick Bobby had been manipulating all morning like a totem. "I can't believe you touched that thing." Her disgust was palpable. Once they were well into the airport she added, "And no more smoking it'll kill you."

His eyes danced.

His partner. His wife.

* * *

><p>They sold it to Carver. They put the passion on overdrive, perhaps to make up for a notable lack of connective tissue. Their line between workplace harassment and murder was weak, but if enthusiasm made cases well... They had a laundry list of time stamped, dated instances of the harassment that their vic had suffered in her own handwriting. And they had formal complaints she had lodged with the Trans Union Air Human Resources department. They also had Jenny Sullivan's documented intention to take her complaints to the state.<p>

Carver was dismissive."As appalling as their behaviour is it doesn't predispose them to murder."

Ronald Carver had been dismissive a lot lately. Maybe this was his punishment. Maybe now all their cases were going to need twice the authenticated evidence and twice the number of signed affidavits. After all he held the outcome of their case in his megalomaniacal palm.

_**Yeah right. This isn't the punishment this is just the icing. **_Goren thought.

Carver's payback for the Bonham case was kissing Eames. It was getting Eames into his car, it was caressing her, it was putting his tongue in her mouth. It was a knife in Goren's gut. It was horrible to think that he was so invested and Alex was still conflicted. Was it his imagination or was Carver's smug face even more smug then usual.

This DA's office felt electrified, every surface was a conductor, every thought shocking. Goren stared at Carver with a fixed kind of insanity. _**This is who she wants?** _This guy was no better then the assholes they were trying to prosecute. Wielding his professional power for personal gain, bringing tension over Eames to the job. If this case taught them anything it was that people didn't stop being people - lude, petty, jealous overlords - during the hours of 9 to 5 or because they were collecting a salary.

Goren stared at Carver and disgust crept in around the edges.

Ron didn't flinch.

* * *

><p>What was it about toilets?<p>

The doors to the lavatory were like truth serum.

No, like a magical gateway into the honesty dimension.

Not 10 minutes after the Sulivan briefing two adversaries had a long overdue confrontation.

"Detective." Carver's voice echoed loudly.

Bobby's shoulders tensed. So, it came down to this. A conversation under the bright fluorescent lights of the courtroom urinal.

"I can't help but feel there is something off in our…" The ADA searched for the right word, "interactions."

Goren looked down. He had his dick out for God's sake. But maybe that was the point, get him while he was weak, jab him in the johnson. The detective took a slow breath. He wouldn't play to this sneak attack. He wouldn't piss all over himself in a panic. Instead he didn't acknowledge. He calmly kept himself in hand and watched the stream of warm lemonade hit the drain. Then he counted.

1… 2… 3… 4… 5

Done.

Adjust.

Tuck.

Zip.

Turn.

"Really? Something's off?" He stared down on the smaller man for a moment. Then he moved casually to the sink.

"I think this is about detective Eames." Carver asserted.

"I think she would castrate us both for this conversation." Bobby smirked during a quick lather and rinse of his hands.

"It's a talk that bears having. And this is about as close to a confessional as were going to get."

He had a point. Goren's eyes panned down to the floor, to the bland white one inch tile. He assessed each stall, no feet in cubicles 1 through 10, and no women allowed. "What exactly do you want to have out?"

"You're interested in something I possess." Carver said cryptically.

"You possess Eames?" Bobby wished he had a tape recorder. Alex would flay this presumptuous fucker alive.

"Poor choice of words." He admitted, "But she is the rub isn't she?"

"You have a wife."

"I also have a legal separation."

"That isn't exactly true is it?" Goren had pulled a favour. He knew the actual status of that separation was pending. There was a signature missing from the document. This lawyer not only had a wife, he had a wife who wanted to make it work.

"Checking up on me?"

"I have my partner's back. It's the natural order of things."

"You want to have her front." The lawyer played with words, it was his stock-in-trade, "Back off."

Goren was seeing now that Ronald Carver was more then just a nice suit and a measured tone. He was something else. He was entitled. Goren could see now that that entitlement was bigger then the job. It went way back. It was a mantra "you're the best Ronny' whispered into a little boy's ear each night before a 13 tog duvet (with an appropriate masculine motif - cowboys? basketballs?) was pulled up around his ears.

The entitlement Goren sensed seemed intrinsic to this dark diminutive man. The entitlement was clearly something he had no conscious awareness of. That was the best kind of confidence. Bobby'd had to nurture his own confidence, all clandestine and illegal like a hydroponic grow op. In Bobby's neighbourhood boys had gotten broken noses for forgetting their place - from other boys and from their mothers.

"Why don't we let Alex decide that."

"She has decided." Carver asserted smoothly shoving open hands into his pockets. "And she'll be deciding again, with me in," He looked at a chunky gold Rolex. "in 32 minutes."

The news felt like a sucker punch but Goren took it like a champ.

"Why are you talking to me then? Go have your booty call." But it wasn't in this cop to concede. He tilted his head (a signature move) and stuck equally easy pose. He thrust his hands into 'almost as good' navy blue pockets and grinned "Oh I get it. This isn't a booty call at all. Could there be trouble in paradise?"

That got Carver's back way up. "I'll have your badge if you cross the line with her."

Goren's grin widened. _**Yes, there it was, the flailing of an insecure man. **_

"An indiscretion with your partner is a code of conduct no no." Carver threatened.

**_Whoa. A serious threat. This guy has it bad._**

"Yeah you're right." Goren held out his hands like the scales of justice. "Code of conduct, 7th commandment." The latter weighed low. He did it again. "Formal reprimand in my jacket. Immortal soul burning in hell." Bobby wasn't religious but he knew that Ronald Carver made it to Holy Trinity Lutheran every Sunday morning.

_**Chew on that.**_

The two men stared at each other either one all too capable of taking a swing, but neither wanting the messiness of it - from the urine splashed floor, from their emotion, from their bruises,_ sullying their business_. The law was their business. Neither moved, but they silently decimated each other, bloodied each other with their eyes.

It soon became clear that there was nothing left to say. Almost nothing. Goren got the last word. "Good talk." He said flipply. He binned his paper towel and pushed past his adversary.

And he left with a bomb ticking down inside him. 32 Minutes, 28 now. The question was should he cut the green wire.

The answer was _yes_.

He found his partner right where he'd left her, outside courtroom 36A.

"Break for lunch?" She asked casually.

"Can we talk first? Privately?" The kid inside every adult knew that no one liked a tattle tale but sometimes it was the only way.

"Um, sure." She checked her phone.

"Somewhere to be?" He lied his face off.

"Lunch meeting. Nothing that can't wait a few."

He guided her down 4 storeys to the subterranean level of the building for complete privacy. Once inside the SUV Bobby told on Ron. Alex sat stone still and she betrayed nothing, not her embarrassment, not her anger not her resentment at being discussed like property, like a mutual problem by these men. The ghost of Jenny Sullivan haunted her in that moment.

Bobby told the truth of course, (the truth was paramount) but he spun it expertly. He spun it as a grievous breach of workplace decorum. He painted himself as ambushed and terribly uncomfortable. He painted Carver (with a very fine precise brush that stayed well inside the lines) as highly inappropriate. "Just thought you should know." he finished.

She looked at him.

He was a master of manipulation.

Alex knew he was playing her and yet she also believed every word.

She had mentally quit Ron ages ago.

Today it was time to let him know.

* * *

><p>The weasel broke. Keith Ramsey broke just like the thug he was, just like the self-important murdering scum bag he was. At first they hadn't liked him for it, he played the goodie good to a tee. A straight arrow, lover of women - a self-aggrandizing one to be sure - but he'd just seemed so genuinely mild mannered. Mild mannered until Goren taunted him into a temper tantrum. A fully evolved 'fling everything off the table' temper tantrum.<p>

And there it was.

The blinding rage that had allowed him to crack Jenny Sullivan's skull.

Pure malevolence compressed into an elven hairdo and an overly tailored suit.

They got him.

"Good job detectives." Deakins smiled. They'd done it again. Goren and Eames were awesome. "You two are…" He faltered mid-accolade. Something was off, the air seemed denser then it should be in the aftermath of a big win.

Unbeknownst to their Captain real life drama was bleeding in, tainting that well earned euphoria. The only woman on this crime-fighting team had had her fill of misogynistic machinations for one day - from the perp, from her un-lover, even from her partner.

Eames flew out of the room leaving the men to follow. Her stride was wide and angry and something in the set of her shoulders said that the next person to get in her face was going to get their teeth handed to them. The men looked at each other wide eyed, wearing their 'hell hath no fury faces'. Still Carver tried to connect, he tried for that old bond. He had to. He felt her slipping away.

"That's the problem with most men, they want what they can't get and don't want what they have." He quipped lightly struggling to keep pace.

"No, the problem with men is they talk too much." She sliced and left them in her dust.


	17. Chapter 17

**COLD COMFORT**

They needed to _see _Roy Manahan. He was the once head of a security detail assigned to the wife of Senator Randolph Kittridge. They needed to address a matter of the utmost sensitivity. Sensitive matters lead to lies. Lies led to stalled cases. So a phone call was out of the question. Bobby had told Alex that the man's facial features: a knob on his nose or the winding of his ear or the shape of his chin, combined with the look in his eyes would give them everything they needed. And she willfully ignored the look in _his_ eyes as he said it. The gazes they shared now were tight and heavy like a satchel crammed with everything and the kitchen sink.

Unfortunately it was a 3 hour rural drive to Binghamton, New York. And 3 hours (one way) was a lot of time. Time to settle into heated seats. Time to tire of the grandiose voices of top 40 radio hosts. Time to cast surreptitious glances at Bobby in all of his buddhist meditative glory. And (worst of the lot) time to roast in her own juices.

Many an ill-fated resolution had been made by wary road warriors. Alex naively joined them. Alex resolved to punch reset. She resolved to stop picking her boyfriends from the shallow pool of 1PP employees. She wanted tabula rasa (though she'd settle for a gently used slate with faint impressions). Alex had a dream, a simple fantasy where she got up, drove to work, punched a clock, collected a paycheque and went home. Simple. Automated. Alex. She wanted the blissfully uncomplicated life of a worker. She wanted her anonymity back. She could feel all the chunks of herself she'd had lost during this debacle with the ADA. She'd exposed her white vulnerable underbelly and her pulse raced with shame at the thought. _**Stupid.**_

It had been a sloppy ending with Ron. He'd said, "I don't want to let go of a good thing." And she'd _finally_ mustered the heart to tell him that it wasn't so good. And the _look_ he had given her… It'd said _**You'll still be hefting those bankers boxes of evidence only now my office will be on top of a cliff.**_ Carver would make them scale and scrabble and grovel to assuage his ego, Alex was sure of it. But whatever. It was done. She felt a thousand, no a million pounds lighter. Perhaps the last vestiges of her innocence were the worst casualty. Her new jaded 'wardrobe' made Pre-Ron Alex seem like an innocent tra-la-laing through the daisies.

She felt calloused.

Hard.

Mean.

They drove up the broad swath of Interstate 380. Alex felt her eyes catch on the salty crust and grey water spots that covered the windshield. And that obstruction, having the world beyond them coated in a filthy film drew her back inside to Bobby over and over and over. She mustered up for another big talk. She owed him the courtesy of a face to face (or rather profile to profile) discussion.

"It's done. It's over." She said abruptly.

His mind whipped and knotted and then _got it_. **_Carver._** "Okay. Good."

"I did it for me." She informed him still speaking cryptically. "I didn't do it because of some notion about _us_ or because of your showdown in the washroom."

Well that stung. She said _us_ like it was ridiculous. She devalued him by applying _that_ inflection to _that_ syllable.

"I know. No one makes you do anything." He said at last because he understood her.

He looked over at her cheek rouged peaches and cream with a porcelain glaze. She was like that when she drove, like a doll, immobile and perfect. She was different in every scene change. In the field she was frightening, rigid and stern and a little bit ugly (if ugly was thing of degrees). At her desk she was very refined, back gently curved as if a flower in repose. With Carver her eyes flashed like lightning all fervent and passionate because they were selling something, constantly selling. And on the phone at night she was seductive. Her voice, even her short dubious puffs and grating irony, ran shivers through him like broken nails on bare skin. Everything about her appealed to him. Including (by necessity) her pride. You couldn't have Alex and not have her pride they were conjoined twins. Currently she reeked of pride. Currently he let her have her pride. Even though it created a thick wooden wedge between them.

"I was stupid to think an office relationship could work." She went on. And he knew that that bit of bite was for him too not just Carver. He knew she wouldn't feel right until she'd reduced every liable connection to nothing. Until she gotten as far away from being weak as she could. Alex knew how to survive - she was a widow, she was Major Case, she was a woman. "I was stupid to think there are any secrets when emotions are involved. I will _never_ do that again." She wanted to make sure he got the point. It wasn't going to happen for them.

"Message received." He enunciated with annoyance because it was hurting now.

This was the most they'd said to each other about their clandestine relationship in the light of day. By tacit agreement their phonecalls and near misses stayed in a bubble somewhere.

"I just think we should take a break." She murmured.

He lowered his window. The cabin of the SUV felt dense and grey and claustrophobic. He needed multi-sensory stimulation. He need true colour. He needed the whip of the cold air even if it made his eyes water. It worked, the gusts slapped his cheeks like a prizefighter's manager and that was how he found his own mean.

"A break?" He turned and spat. "You never even let us get going. A break from nothing."

Pain all around.

She'd asked for it. She was taking her resentments toward Ron and their tryst and heaping them on Bobby. Poor Bobby she liked him (maybe even loved him) and he had to pay for that. _**Slice out the gangrene never mind the chunk of healthy flesh you take with it.**_

"Fine. If it was nothing then move on. I will too. Co-workers, period."

"Fine by me." He didn't dare look at her. _**If she's a doll then she is the meanest barbie on the shelf**_, he thought. His right bicep twitched with anger, then his left was at it too.

There were no words.

Only the whir and bump of the road.

Only cinched faces.

His facade cracked first.

"I'm glad you untangled yourself from Carver. He's borderline sociopath you know? Don't be surprised if you have to tell him a few more times before it sinks in."

"I was clear. He gets it. Ron is okay." She said mildly she wasn't going to start trash talking him just because it was over.

Bobby choked out a noise. A growl? A grunt?

"What?" She demanded.

"Don't defend him or I'll lose my breakfast, that's what."

"I'm not defending him." Ron didn't need a champion, Ron was more then capable of garrotting his own enemies.

Bobby was baffled and repulsed by her behaviour. _**Like me!**_ He wanted to scream. _**Need me!**_ _**Defend me!**_ It felt awful, this unrequited affection. It was the 16th circle of hell - a plane of existence tailor made for him - the sum of lust, anger and treachery. "What in the hell do you see in that guy anyway?"

"What does anyone see in anyone?"

"Warmth, kindness, selflessness." His words were a commentary on Carver's shortcomings.

"Show me a cop or a lawyer that isn't an asshole." Not that she wanted to be kept by some asshole. But the qualities he listed, the better angels of human nature, sounded so childish to her new grown up ears.

"Wow. That's a high bar." He dripped sarcasm. He felt despair. She had gone off and formed another layer of scar tissue for him to hack through.

"Oh and you're going to treat me right?" She laughed at the absurdity clenching on the steering wheel. "You're going to take me away from all this?" She whacked it.

"Maybe I am. Maybe we fit."

"We don't fit."

"Let's have a glass of wine and spread your legs first."

She turned a stunned quarter revolution, her pupils suspended in a cloud."You want to do this here Goren? Really? You want to get dirty on the job?"

"May as well, since apparently you're cutting me loose." His eyes attacked her.

"I just got out of a relationship with a master of the universe! Maybe I need a week before I crawl into bed with you!"

"Relationship my ass. You were enemies with benefits, you didn't even like him." She was surprised at how astute he was. Though she shouldn't have been, Robert Goren's third eye never blinked. "And don't flatter yourself about how covert you were, I've known for over a year."

A trickle of ice cold ran through her. It was the worst news for someone ashamed, someone who'd already struck a humiliation posture. Alex immediately pulled hard left, a sharp swerve into a transport truck weighing station and threw it into park. "What did you just say?"

"You heard me. I knew what was going on and I was matching you screw for screw."

Her head flew back her, jaw loosened. "Is that what your overactive sex drive was all about? Is that why you picked every bimbo within arm's reach? So I would see?" She'd been sick about his choices. She'd all but fashioned voodoo dolls and stuck pins in their stupid little heads.

"Don't flatter yourself." He yelled because she had it exactly right.

She looked at him inches away only a gear shift for amour. Sitting there in his suit, filling up more then his share of the cabin. His grey legs were splayed and his jackets were unbuttoned. Suddenly he seemed dangerous.

"Let's calm down." The words were deja vu on her tongue. His unpredictability (his latent anger) always led to misbehaviour. If Goren hit a certain pitch cataclysm followed.

"No." And before she could challenge again he came across the console and took her mouth.

She bucked free all smeared lipstick and outrage. "What are you doing?"

He sat back, coiled like a cobra. "You know what I'm doing." She did know. He'd been laying in wait. She was finally free, the flag had dropped.

A zing shot through her, to be in his sights was... _**Adrenaline junkie. **_She licked her lips, just a little, just a peek of pink darting out and around. She tasted him on her.

"We can't keep doing this dance Bobby."

"Okay." But he had fixed on her mouth.

"I'm not a conquest. This is complicated. I'm complicated."

"I wouldn't want you if you weren't." His mind needed something hearty to dig into. She imagined him sucking her bones after that meal.

"Help me…" She started then stopped. _**What? Help me stay away from you? How sad. **_

In the end neither sprang or grabbed. They just kind of drifted back to each other in equal measure. They met again over the arm rest. And it was the kind of kiss that felt like two years in the making. Soft, wet, plump tissue and throaty moans.

He claimed the high ground (of course) as his head almost scrapped the ceiling and she lengthened and twisted beneath him trying to keep up. The kiss was tinged with insanity the way he pushed her wide, the way he pressed into her. He wanted this badly, _so badly_.

"Stop." She panted into his mouth.

"You sure?" He drew back a little and she followed.

"No."

He smiled.

"Stop smiling." She demanded and bit his lower lip, a love bite, then plunged in again. She ran lightly over the ridge of his teeth then his soft palate, then plumbed a molar. This was more then a kiss this was an oral exam, an investigation, a pleasure pilgrimage.

"That was a first." He laughed.

"Good." She wanted to know things that other women didn't.

Then just like that she shed her skin. Her blazer and coat and scarf lay deflated in her seat and suddenly a light lithe thing in a tank top came at him sideways, jamming his head and back against the door.

"What happened to never again?" He couldn't resist goading her with words she'd used only minutes ago.

"My prerogative, my terms." And she pushed his head to one side and fixed her lips to his jaw.

As he sat there pinned by her assault he consciously submitted to her. He had never thought the bitch thing would work so well on him but it did. The more self-confidence this woman displayed the harder he got. Eventually after she tasted his lobe and neck he grabbed her face, a big hand on her chin and he took mouth again.

"Come here. Come over." He was begging now. Begging for the weight of her on his lap.

And that was when she broke free, as if some hypnotist had snapped fingers and broken the suggestion. In an abrupt motion she planted back firmly in the drivers seat then turned and started the car. And before he could regain powers of speech, she had steered them back into traffic. She poured on the windshield wiper fluid and the real world came into hyper-focus. Something was lost with that clarity.

Bobby sat there shocked and throbbing. God she was cruel. He looked at her with narrowed eyes. Then he poked her bare shoulder _hard_.

"Ow. What?" She snapped.

"Sorry you're just the first convincing piece of artificial intelligence I've ever seen."

"Funny."

He looked closer and now he saw it: parted lips, an even deeper flush, her chest rising and falling a fraction too quickly. She was affected all right, she was affected and scared of that affection. And the surge of joy he felt at that. From despair to joy in 10 minutes, such was this fucked up beautiful partnership.

"I meant what I said." She shot him a quick look with veiled eyes. "I need time."

"Fine. Let me know."

It was a bizarrely calm exchange, not unlike one they'd had this morning:

'_**Hand me that pencil'**_

'_**I'm using it.' **_

'_**I need it.' **_

'_**When I'm done.' **_

'_**Fine. Let me know.'**_

* * *

><p>"Detective. A word." All three of them paused on their path and blinked at one another until it became clear that Carver was speaking exclusively to Goren. Eames glanced nervously between the men but walked on ahead to give them a moment. She entered and took a seat inside of the ADA's masculine tome lined, wooden office. She crossed her legs tightly and tugged at her black turtleneck, her monochromatic sheath of androgyny. She refused to worry about what was keeping the men out in the hallway, although she was losing feeling in her crotch from the severe set of her legs. She didn't need to worry, she had bowed out, this was none of her business. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. <em><strong>Just waiting for my co-workers<strong> _she repeated. Still she jumped when they entered the room.

Alex looked from A to B to A again, neither betrayed a thing. _**Good. Professionalism. This wasn't going to be difficult at all**_. She immediately turned their attention to the Kittridge casefile. "The ME said if he had an aneurysm he'd have headaches and dizziness not just fatigue."

"That's why he doesn't see her in the evenings because in the early stages of Alzheimer's that's when the symptoms appear. He - he lied to her." Goren explained and burrowed into a ball because this civilized professional banter was an act. _**No hard feelings. Yeah right. **_

"Or he did tell her he has Alzheimer's and she's keeping the secret." Carver issued flipply.

"The disease is inherited Nick could pass it to their kids I can't imagine any woman having children under those circumstances."

"So Spencer Durning and his son are deceiving this poor woman just to produce an heir?" Carver rang incredulous.

"No. A spare. If they can't find a cure for Nicholas, Durning will use this grandchild to retain control over the foundation."

"That would be detestable and so far unprovable."

"Will a show and tell help? It's our turn to call a bluff."

"Ah a trick." The lawyer's look was knowing. "Sure call me when you have something concrete." And with a sweep of his overcoat and attache Ron was gone.

"That wasn't so bad." Alex murmured after a few moments of silence. "I think you two played very nicely together."

"Of course he threatened me on the way in."

"What!?" She whipped around and hit her leg on the solid mahogany table. "No he didn't." She denied because it was absurd.

"I told you he's a sociopath." Bobby shook his head "He compartmentalizes."

"What did he say?"

"Section 132, subsection 4."

Her furrowed brow said it all.

"It's the passage in the code of conduct specifically relating to the fraternization of partners, subordinates and equally employed individuals inside the New York City police department. It outlines all potential disciplinary action to be taken."

"How would you even know that?" She shook her head.

"I read it." He had read it once 12 years ago and then again 12 hours ago after she'd almost mounted him in a requisitioned police SUV. Because he was doing this. He was going to have Alexandra Eames and no act of God, NYPD regulation or Ronald Carver were going to stop him. Know thine enemy was rule number one, so Bobby'd set out to understand the potential consequences and the hot buttons of the small lawyer wielding them. Anyway, machinations aside Bobby liked reading texts that were neatly sectioned. Especially ones with sequential numerical reference points such as: medical journals, declarations, codified law, footnotes, contracts, religious doctrine. The information always proved easier to retrieve in his memory palace.

"Of course you did." He was the scariest thing Alex had ever met and she once met a guy who'd taken a bite out of his mother's corpse.

"He wasn't being nice today. He was being Carver. _Read the subtext._"

"Are you saying I'm slow?"

"No. You're single minded and emotionally involved." He advanced on her. She backed up to let him pass, but he didn't want to pass he wanted to box her in between the cabinet and the wall. He wanted to see if this news about her former lover would make her scratch and hiss or relent. Also this was _his_ office and Bobby was of a mind to defile it.

"Not here." She whispered a quiver in her voice.

"He called you his property." Bobby whispered back, " And now he's warning men away."

She looked up and over baring her neck, "Who should I let manipulate me today? You or him?"

"Me. Definitely me." He got even closer, his body pressed hers. He sniffed her hair.

"You're sniffing me." She murmured into his raspy cheek.

"I do that."

"I know. I just wonder how I stack up, you know, to all the corpses."

He filled his nose again. "You're my baseline."

She smiled in spite of herself. That was probably the most romantic thing a man had ever said to her.

He went in for the kiss. Her palms came up flat against his chest and stopped him.

"Just so you know I'm only letting you do this because it's poetic justice."

He nodded.

And so he kissed her for the second time in a day, with her back against the glass fronted curio cabinet beside a framed photo of little Freddy, a trifecta of curling trophies and beneath a matted image of the star spangled banner.


	18. Chapter 18

**CHERRY RED**

Alex descended the steep narrow stairwell over the drone of Detective Marcus Appleton. He was leading a special task force assigned to fraud in the HPD (Department of Housing Preservation and Development) and he wanted answers. As she moved Alex attuned to the details of foul play. There were divots in the wooden railing from nails and teeth. There were black scuffs on the lower third of the wall from sensible shoes seeking purchase. There were flecks of maroon dotted (and smeared) all over the pitted dingy concrete.

Alex also catalogued disturbances in the energy, a subliminal awareness of kinetic leftovers. _That_ wasn't something a cop ever said aloud. Cops liked batons and bullets and procedure but there were grand intuitive leaps required to propel their pursuit criminals. First the speculation then the evidence. Speculation, evidence. Speculation, evidence. Imagining where the perp stood, imagining the momentum of a blade or the exertion of a push lay comfortably in the realm of the 6th sense. At the bottom Bobby was a big ball of black overcoat. He used single pale finger to prod the expired form of Katherine Finoff.

"Well can we make the task force's day?" Alex joined him on her haunches.

"Well it depends on what she tells us right?" Together they leaned into their mission and she immediately knew, just from the quality of his crouch that he was lighter today. Lightness in murder was a very delicate undertaking. They were 'allowed' levity. But not in traditional ways. Ribald jokes and cabalish cackles were out of the question. Instead there was a playfulness in the way his fingers tickled the air, in the way he confidently blended science and junk science:

_**"So she was coming down the left hand side when she tripped." Alex issued a supposition.**_

_**"Which is odd seeing as how she's right handed."**_

_**"Ah…" a puff of genuine confusion. How the hell could he know that? Had they penned a novel together?**_

_**"Uh the gums on her left side recede more then the ones on the right. People brush more vigorously on the opposite side of their dominant hand."**_

_**Oh, of course.**_

There was no denying he was happy.

She was happy too.

Their relationship was standing still. They had still only had a handful of small intimacies. But for two people who had been stuck in different dimensions being at the starting line was as good as living together, being on the cusp of that romantic journey was invigorating. And, of course it didn't hurt that this case felt like an honest to goodness whodunit. This was going to be a fun. _**You're going to straight to hell.**_ _**Murder is not fun. **_Her conscience condemned.

Except when it was.

"Come on genius." She called heading right back up. "Let's see how she lived."

Inside Kate Finoff's modest flat were, thrift store prints, impressionist art posters, matryoshka dolls (genuine Russian made ones Bobby said), hand me down furniture and the trappings of a new pet owner. Cats. Alex hated cats. _**If I want to be ignored until mealtime I'll get a boyfriend**_ and in the next instance, **_maybe the cats pushed her down the stairs. _**Bobby proved a font of knowledge about cat allergies.

"I had a girlfriend Lola she had cats." He explained. Alex shot daggers. He was going to hell too, for invoking the name Lola. Now it seemed even the ones that pre-dated her were pissing her off.

"You ate furballs for her?" _**And was she also a showgirl?**_ The inner monologue never quit. Alex sped away from Bobby (and Lola) to explore the apartment solo. "Maybe she did it for a boyfriend, birth control pills!" Alex called quite gamely from inside the vic's medicine cabinet.

And Bobby wondered, with his hands clasped behind his back and his mind between his legs, if Eames was on birth control, if he would have to wear a condom when he pushed inside her. There was an old theory about men and sex. In Bobby's estimation every 7 seconds was a gross overestimation. Unless of course you were half of a coed crime fighting team that spent an average 11 hours a day together, 5 to 6 days a week. Under that specific set of circumstances thoughts of parting your partner's thighs came more like once every 5 seconds.

_**Once every 5 seconds that was 17280 times a in a 24 hour cycle. Factor for sleep - 6 hours of oblivion optimistically **_(although he had had quite the dream about her the other night)_** and that means in an approximate 30 day month, I think about screwing Eames...**_

The sudden appearance of the landlady put violent end to his mathematica erotica.

* * *

><p>"What was the wheelbase on this one?"<p>

"108 inches."

"Ford Shelby GT 500. '67 for sure the guy's using original stock tires. I mean, I don't see any wear in them." Lewis' voice rang incredulous as Bobby fussed over his visual aids. The two men had been sequestered in this room for over an hour pinning pretty pictures and speculating about some of the most beautiful cars ever conceived. The room was a thick cloud of camaraderie. With all of this smiling and ribbing it didn't feel like work at all.

"Detective Alex." Lewis sprung up suddenly and rubbed his hands with debauched glee. Alex liked Bobby's little friend. His good natured nervous energy and his flattering interest in her were just plain fun. The room felt fresh and zesty with Lewis in it.

"Down boy." She tossed back shyly. Alex watched her partner with his friend. This was a fully evolved intimate masculine relationship. Two men that hugged like that - full body contact - knew each other very well. She had never asked Bobby about Lewis. She'd never asked him about anything. Keeping her walls fortified had more important than any passing curiosities. But now she wondered. Where had they met? Military? College? No not long enough. High school. _**Yeah high school.**_ And Bobby called him Lewis even though his name was Chris. When do men use surnames? Alex quizzed herself. She'd bet the load they'd played some sport together. Football? Basketball?

Her eye moved back to Lewis. He was reasonably good looking. He was casual but smartly dressed. His surname was on the company letterhead, so he was definitely a successful entrepreneur. But those tinted glasses… weird. Her money said non-conformist. Or no. No! A shop floor accident. _**A welder's flash.**_ Light sensitive eyes. These fluorescent tubes would be a real bitch to damaged eyes. Her Uncle Roy had gotten one too many welder's flashes and lost the vision in his left eye.

Perp? Potential suitor? Partner's friend? It didn't matter Alex used the same skill set to delve deep then she ever had. Bobby deferred to Lewis as an expert. Her partner only did that when he was in the sphere of a master. So Alex guessed that he wasn't just a certified auto tech but perhaps one with a diploma in classic car restoration? And Lewis was definitely a man with decades of practical application. _**Of course. The Mustang. **_It made perfect sense now (a real wonder it hadn't before). This was where it had come from and how it stayed in good repair.

This case _was_ fun.

"Good bye detective." The mechanic sing-songed as he left.

'So soon?' Alex wanted to rebutt but Deakins' was there grim faced, haunting the corners and waiting for his progress report.

* * *

><p>The takedown.<p>

She watched Bobby regress to a small boy in the thrall of a cherry red Ferrari.

"You have to come out now." She deadpanned.

He looked up from inside the tight interior with startled eyes.

"Ask her out on a date you're almost the same age." Alex called back following Roger Coffman to the squad car.

"You're very funny." He returned, hanging out of the classic car, his head swimming with the scent leather and wax, his fingers gripping the hand stitched steering wheel.

"And you're still in the car." She was laughing now, her mirth bouncing off the walls of the garage.

He did eventually emerge from his (and Roger's) wet dream. They decided to stop for a bite in the lull between booking and interrogation. Alex chose an old brown leather booth sliding her bottom over a tear patched with silver duct tape.

"I have to start a dossier: The Goren file." She smiled. She'd archived so much new information about him today. But details about Bobby dripped off of teaspoons rather then heaped in by the ladle. She wanted chronology, she wanted context. And she _didn't_ want to know why he was suddenly so fascinating.

"You _really didn't_ like me." He said as the waitress clanked his sandwich down along with a basket of golden french fries.

Her stomach rumbled. "Why do you say that now?"

"Because I have a CIA level file on you." He held his fingers an inch apart.

"_Didn't_ like you..." She rolled her eyes.

"Ha ha." He said and tucked into a late lunch.

"So." She sipped a mug of green tea. "Lewis was in good form."

"Yeah. So helpful." He took a bite of his sandwich and flicked the red mesh basket her way. She'd said she wasn't hungry. She'd ordered tea. They didn't stand on ceremony the rule was 'when nature calls, answer' _whatever_ natural urges needed filling. But he could feel her tracking his food with her eyes. "You on some kind of diet?" He asked his gob crammed to overflowing.

"A cleanse." She bit out. _**Can I have a secret? Just one damn secret.**_

"Don't lose an ounce." He commanded and she was at once girlishly flattered and completely put off (mostly by the fact that she was flattered at all).

"Does he have a girlfriend?" Alex asked at one point. "Lewis." Then picked up a huge fry, cut to two of her finger widths at least. So much for detoxification.

"Forget it." He answered.

"Forget what? I asked you a question."

"Forget Lewis. He's chronically in love and terminally single."

"So he's single." She clarified angrily.

Bobby set his sandwich down a little slap dash and the bread and pickles separated from the pastrami."Yeah he's single."

"That wasn't so hard was it?"

It had been hard. Like choking on a fist of ciabatta. Especially now, because now he had to tell her. "He wants to ask you out. He asked me to test the waters for him." Bobby said at last.

"He asked you today?" _She knew it._

He nodded. "Yeah today. And you aren't available."

"You don't own me Goren."

"So you want to date Lewis now?" He was incredulous.

"Don't you think It would make life easier?"

"Whose life? He's my best friend."

"I meant if we got involved with people far far from that incestuous pit we work in."

"No I don't" He leaned in close. "And all acts against us are treason."

"Again. _You don't own me_." Her teeth gritted.

"What are we doing here Alex?" He slammed his hands on the table, his appetite gone. "Now you think it's a good idea to fuck my best friend?"

"Calm the hell down." Her whisper was harsh, "Who said anything about fucking? G_od Bobby! _This is exactly why _we_ shouldn't happen."

He sighed from his soul. He was so tired of this. This stalling, this pretending. It was all horseshit. She was getting off on playing keep-away. Power. Power. Who has the power. Every kiss wasn't a small victory it was Alex buying time to rearm.

"Are you in this Alex?" He asked at last. "Are we moving toward a relationship?" He just wanted to hear it. No more games.

"I d-don't know."

"Not good enough." His voice was too loud for the diner, it rose above the din of dialogue and dishes and the hollers of 'order up', people looked at them. "Are you in?" He insisted.

"Bobby, stop…"

"Are. You. In?" He yelled, patrons be damned.

Her answer was a robust breath that blew up the corners of his napkin. She pressed the heel of her palm to a spot just above her right eye where a kamikazee headache was screeching in. "I can't give you that."

"Why?"

"Because it's all I have." And wasn't that the truth.

His groan was a dissertation on frustration. "I can't have this conversation. I'll take the subway back." And he stood and left. Just like that. His empty spot in the booth felt like a slap in the face. And she felt compelled to go after him, to reassure him, to reassure herself. Her troubled tummy drove her out and onto the sidewalk. She stopped there in front of the building looking back and forth. Desperate for a glimpse of him.

"Ah ha." Came the sound of slick victory from 10 steps away. He was there at a newsstand. The crafty bastard was thumbing through the latest issue of Time Magazine. She could see Donald Rumsfeld's blue jowls and hairy eyeball gazing out from the front cover.

"Ah ha? What? Is this one of your tricks?" Yep. He got her. She'd run after her man.

"Tricks?"

"You know psychological experiments. I feel like my life is a control group."

"Control group." He pshawed "You're patient zero. You started the disease. Trust me _this_ is a disease." He slapped down the periodical and folded into the pedestrian wave. She rushed forward and easily kept pace. "I can't stop." He said to her and no one. "You show your hand and I get a buzz. I keep trying to get you to care. Thank you for making me petty."

Spontaneously she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the doorway of a shop. A random alcove which ended up being Madam Toulmin's Mystical World: Clairvoyants, Tarot, Palm Readings. Plenty of privacy. **_W__**h**o would want to get into this place?_ **Alex thought.

"I do care." She barked, looking up angrily. "I like you. Alright?"

"Like? You _like_ me? The way Sally Biltmore _liked_ me in grade 2? Stop you're making me dizzy."

"Oh shut up." This was hard for her.

He could feel her straddling pride and prejudice and panic here in this mystical reprieve from New York. He looked around at the painted blue pictorial of the whirls and eddies of human unconscious all around them.

"You make me want to… I mean, I like you more than anyone else." Coincidentally she settled on exactly what Sally Biltmore had said.

"Anyone? Really? Anyone?" He probed.

"Anyone." She said firmly, (her mind found caveats - there was her dad of course, her brother and sister) but she would take a bullet for Bobby and it was a category of care - of stripped naked loyalty - that set him apart in every way.

"Show me." He took a step back, his body resting perfectly in the vee of a large shimmering gold letter Y.

"Show you how much I like you?"

He nodded and crossed his arms.

She was locked for a moment in indecision. She could hurl herself back onto sidewalk, into that push of people and never speak of this again. She could kiss him until he was gasping and turgid. She could use the art of persuasion, she hadn't been given this sharp tongue and mind for nothing. But there was one other option.

She moved to him, just a single pace and a small shuffle, bridging the gap in that tight enclosure. She took his forearms and slowly unwound them and tucked them down against his sides. He let them hang there limp and heavy, waiting. She unbuttoned the tortoise shell discs on his woolen coat then did the same to the suit beneath. She heard his breath catch when she slipped her arms inside, she heard it catch again when she locked her arms behind him. Then one more time when she let her cheek rest in the region of his heart.

"I'm not grieving… as much." She murmured, "and I'm not tired or delirious or hiding in the dark. I just really really like you."

He slid his hands up over her. Over the layers of fabric over the dull thrust of her weapon, over her cloaked featureless form. This was definitely daytime Alex. He couldn't really _feel_ anything of her except her acquiescence, her vulnerability, her warm cheek burrowing in. It puffed him up, firmed him up in response. Her softness made him a man. They stood there like that for a long time. Perhaps it was the best kind of embrace because they met as equals without the carnivorous need of previous unions. Something in him ached a little at the perfection of this simple hug. He brought a hand up and curled it around his approximation of her middle, over her boxy coat. Then he took his other hand and smoothed her hair and brow. Her hair felt like down. He stooped at the neck and pressed his mouth to her temple and she tipped her chin up and into it and smiled.

Her look of complete trust and contentment imprinted on him.

* * *

><p>"Hey man! Long time no see."<p>

Lewis and Bobby had a man-date the following evening. They greeted each other with choreographed hands and a thunderous hug.

"This is so overdue dude." Lewis smiled shrugging out of his leather coat and scarf. For Bobby it'd been so good to see his friend at 1PP that this offer of night out at Worthy's (a local bar) seemed like the only sensible thing to do. Bobby was willing to admit that a lot of emotions were working through him these days, love, lust and now with Lewis nostalgia and loneliness.

Lewis gestured for a waitress and ordered a beer. "I meant to ask yesterday, how's Frannie."

"She would tear you a new one if she heard you call her that." Bobby smirked. Frannie was Frances his mother.

"Don't I know it." Part of Lewis' charm was his lack of boundaries, his laissez-faire attitude toward authority.

"She's good, m-may-maybe I could take you to see her sometime?" It was uncomfortable for Bobby to ask, given his mom's razor edge temper and his lifelong embarrassment at her behaviour, but she was getting older and seeing people from the neighbourhood made her happy.

"Sure Bobby anything for you man." And that wasn't lip service. "She taking the meds?"

"Oh yeah, it's non-negotiable at Carmel Ridge."

"Good, good. You don't need her making shit for you at work."

He didn't deny it. Lewis knew. That was the thing about schizophrenia it wasn't neat or contained it bled all over everything. It was a God damn massacre of accusations and shame and silly phone calls and voices from the almighty. Schizophrenia had had Bobby in it's sights his entire life.

"So you're a busy guy." Lewis dragged him back.

"Uh huh, work is kicking my ass." He'd shed his tie but he was still wearing the suit, his new skin.

"I'll bet. But you like it." It wasn't a question Lewis could see the change in his friend now. Fulfillment looked good on Goren. He knew too well that Bobby without a challenge was a disaster in slow motion.

"I can't complain, more money, more autonomy, more respect."

"And Detective Alex." His friend drawled.

"The way you say that." Bobby rolled his eyes.

"She's hot."

"We've both done hotter."

"Look at you player." Lewis leaned back on his bar stool and took in the entirety of his friend.

"Player. Yeah right." Bobby looked down and swept his fingers over the sweat on the outside of his beer.

"Have you? Been spreading them?" A lewd look crossed his friend's face "That's a big building you work in, there's probably enough quality action in that place for what a decade? How long until retirement?" Lewis laughed.

"I've cracked some." Bobby didn't normally kiss and tell unless the telling served an ends. And in this this case he needed to be a guy's guy who didn't have time to think about his partner. "Too many in the last year. Soon they'll be forming a union."

Both men hooted back their lagers.

"What about you? Gettin' any?" Bobby asked.

"Sheila..."

"Fuuuuuuck not Sheila again." Lewis and Sheila, Sheila and Lewis, it'd been a running theme for the last decade. Sheila was crazy. Country music crazy. Slash your tires and tell your boss you liked hookers crazy.

"We're done. Finally, forever. She's getting married."

"Well Hallelujiah." Bobby raised an amber bottle and they clincked.

"Yeah she's someone else's problem now. What I need is a someone normal, on a scale of 1 to Sheila." He sobered, "Get me in with detective Alex."

"God you're like a dog with a boner." Bobby muttered. He felt a bitterness in his throat and it wasn't the beer. Possessiveness and irritation made a powder keg inside a man."She's not even your type."

"She's hot." Lewis said again. "And hotness is about more then a face and an ass. It's a quality. Am I right?"

Bobby nodded.

"She has something. Like she knows secrets. Like she doesn't take any shit. Like she could be _really_ soft."

"Check and check. But soft? Now I know you don't know her."

"That's what dating is for." Lewis pushed.

"She's also my partner pervert. And you're my friend. It's too messy."

"I get that. I do." But he still looked conflicted. **_God_ **Bobby wondered,_** is he in love with her? Could he be love a woman he doesn't even know?** _It was a very romantic idea, a very upsetting idea and very Lewis idea. Lewis blazed like a matchstick, he was all schemes and dreams and burned fingertips.

"I think she's in a relationship." Bobby said and meant to leave it there.

"With you?" And because the question was so pointed and poignant he looked up sharply. In that instant he knew he'd been had.

"Now I see. You won't hook us up because you want her for yourself! You dog." Lewis crowed out victory on a swig of beer.

"It's not like that."

"You aren't in her pants?"

"Watch it." Bobby warned he wasn't going to degrade Alex that way.

"Ohhh, I get it." And the two men warily locked eyes. One pair was full of giddy certainty, the other mortification.

"Get what?" Bobby murmured.

"You're waiting..."

"There's nothing going on..."

"...because you love her."

"I don't love her." His gut exploded like a supernova.

"Yeah man, you love her."

"New topic."


	19. Chapter 19

**ZOONOTIC**

There is Greek lore about a god named Pan. A being born of Odysseus and Penelope. He was a strange union of both man and beast. The barrel and arms of homosapien. Legs of fur and bowed horns, the tail of a goat, the snub nose of a hound, the pointed ears of a jackal and a thick sweeping beard. He was beguiling nonetheless and he wielded great power. Luring nymphs with melodies from his flute. Pan roamed the countryside notoriously naked with tremendous appetites laying and mating in a frenzy of sexual desire. He was symbolic of the needs of the flesh and of the elemental connection between man and nature.

Pan was also the god gradually twisted to fit the skin of our devil. And in that shift came the perversion of pleasure. The devil, drunk with his power, seized souls and fed on them. He touched humanity in the way of music - that invisible force that compels us to think and emote and _move_. The Devil also found the gaps. The gaps in our makeup and education and crammed them with carnal urges: gluttony and power and greed and selfishness.

This case felt like the Devil and Pan and everything else earthy and right and wrong. This case and everyone it touched caught a bit of the demon.

* * *

><p>Two men of science. Both doctors. A burly square jawed cretin and his fey reedy companion. One large and lusty, the other lean and luring and manipulative not unlike that flute. Together they were a symbiotic sickness. The nymphs were now nurses, assistants, docents but still exploited by their affinity for art, opera and theatre and sculpture. And did this pair manipulate. Together they moved effortlessly across species lines. Syringes loaded and cocked with diseases tapped from swine and pteropine and bovine and murine and canine. There was something about Roger Stern and Scott Borman, something supernaturally endorsed, something that blurred the lines between man and beast, good and evil.<p>

Of course it started with an underachiever. Detective Billy "Buzz" Davis was ambitious and unremarkable and dead in a cage. Not a cage, a full-height turnstile but the symbolism was undeniable.

"He's wearing a vest. He expected trouble." Goren flipped back the man's jacket and pulled on the thick black kevlar.

"He found it." Eames said grim about the mouth.

Buzz was no rockstar he was hand to mouth, gaming the system for a few extra bucks wherever he could, his hustles included: bargain cigarettes, blackmail and defrauding medicare defrauders.

"I'm not sayin' he was Serpico." That was the understatement of the century and from the lips of his captain outfitted head to toe Suffolk County dress beige, the latest in park ranger, zookeeper chic.

* * *

><p><strong><em>"Have you told anyone about me yet?" He sat enrobed in white holding a hairbrush and a belly full of malevolence.<em>**

**_"There isn't much to tell yet other then outside a spa I've never seen so many jets in one shower." She came out and joined him wrapped in two huge glorious white towels. This apartment felt like a luxury hotel and he was a doctor. Eeek! She could just squeal. This was what it felt like to win the dating lottery._**

**_"I like a clean body." He grinned "You're so beautiful there really isn't a jealous boyfriend somewhere?" She wished for a moment he would stop looking at her that way. It was hard to describe. Vacant and yet busy._**

**_"No not for the last three years. I've gotten used to to being alone."_**

**_"From now on you'll be anything but alone." His touch was clinical. He stripped her. He inspected her but he never entered her. He just owned her._**

* * *

><p>Bobby and Alex tumbled around a bit in Buzz's life but it wasn't until in that foursquare with a hooker, a ground floor room inside Micky's Hotel, that things started to sizzle. Her name was Angel. In a nutshell Angel thought Alex was cute, an impromptu menage a trois was okay and that cops were nosy and cheap.<p>

"I tell ya, you give a guy a badge..." She smack talked and Bobby rolled his eyes and his head in defense of the brotherhood.

When Angel finally sauntered off with her LBD, her virtue and her sheet untouched the detectives hung back.

"She was funny." Bobby said in that way he had, that way that observed human folly but didn't get any of their mess on him.

"Yeah a real pro-comedian. If that whole sex for money thing falls through..." Alex let her lips twist pleased with herself.

"I agree with her." He said.

"What?" Alex tucked her badge back onto her belt. "You think all guys with badges are opportunist cheapskates?"

"Uh no." He tipped to her with amusement, "I agree that you're cute."

"Bobby." Her voice was loaded with censure.

He gestured with his head, a c'mere of sorts. A dangerous proposition as he was sitting on that shiny floral bedspread again and the door was locked and the room was reserved until 11am the next morning. He held out a hand and she looked at it like it was a stick of lit dynamite.

"Bad idea."

"Good idea. My best one of the day." he countered, "Don't overthink it."

He was right most days she thought so hard her brain cried uncle. Certain situations called for a little spontaneity. Which was why it really hadn't taken much for Alex to give in to her desire to feel him on a bed. She'd walked up cool as you please ignored the hand and sat quite cheekily on his lap.

"Like this?" She teased.

And she realized her mistake the moment her bottom met the firm plank of his thighs. He couldn't be toyed with. He couldn't temper himself now.

In the sweep of an eyelash he'd flipped her back and was ripping at the barriers. Then he was between her thighs. For the first time in her life (her recalled life) Alex felt helpless. They kissed yes, but the gist of this tussle were their belts and his hands ripping alternately at hers then his. He would later claim insanity. He'd just wanted to get inside her. Like blue fever. His only thoughts were base and id fuelled: _stick it in, jamb it it, get it in_. He had never been possessed in that way before.

"Bobby no. Bobby not here, not our first time." Coming from the only voice in the universe he ever truly listened to. And in fear of himself he sprung back, and off the bed and stumbled against the door. And then he apologized profusely. She sat up slowly a little tousled and a lot conflicted. And even over his clipped rapidfire "Sorry. Sorry. Sorry." Even over his 'Goren in distress' display - the head grabbing, the agitated pacing - part of her wished she hadn't been wearing a belt at all.

After that Bobby avoided her for days (as best he could). He used the rule of obstacles: one person or piece of furniture between them at all times. Because he felt a monster inside. He could have taken her there without consent or reason. He did know why. He'd been filled with something. Some kind of zeal, some kind of demon.

* * *

><p><strong><em>"So Scott what's your specialty."<em>**

**_"Hands on care."_**

**_He stalked around and around her with a obscene glint in his eye. She wanted to laugh at his innuendo and his shirt (last seasons Asian characters) and short sleeves? In the evening? Really? She looked down at her own cocktail dress and fingered her pixie do. The way he was staring. Her throat closed up. Her smile started to ache._**

**_"Roger has been keeping you under wraps. and now I see why."_**

**_She felt hunted._**

**_She felt inspected._**

**_She felt like he wanted to split her open._**

**_"I wonder what's keeping Roger?" She found her laugh now, wooden and worried._**

* * *

><p>Bobby and Alex made a safari to the Hudson Zoo to observe the vainglorious Dr. Borman in his natural habitat. Once the doctor was in the operating theatre with his hyena they'd found the nearest exit and laughed like a herd of them. It didn't take much to muster up an impression,<p>

"We're all mammals in here right ladies." Bobby feigned a bassy voice and a chesty swagger.

"The look on your face." She cried wiping her eyes.

"The look on yours, when he asked you to pass his scrubs."

"I was going to shove them down his throat." She gripped her sore middle. "You actually went and got them."

"I was defending your honour."

She guffawed, though she felt the truth in it. Bobby had been running interference. She had been protected in that room and not at all annoyed by his presumptive behaviour. She wouldn't cop to it of course. She wasn't going to tell him it had thrilled her and that she'd loved being tucked behind him.

"My hero." She lifted her shield of sarcasm.

"I try." He shot back.

It felt nice to be normal with him, _to laugh,_ no holds barred, they never did that. She slapped his arm lightly and edged past him in the tight corridor. Only to find herself whiplashed back and jammed her up against that private concrete wall. Suddenly he was rough and different. Just like that he had her mouth in his. He all but ate her. Who was the animal now?

And she shoved him away hard slamming her forearm into his chest. Then thought better of it pulled him back in and kissed him like a vortex. He cupped her and squeezed her and lifted her right off her feet. Like soul sucker prey she felt her energy being drawn out through her mouth. She wasn't docile. She ground hips and chest against him. And he pressed back, hard.

"Ow."

"You like it when it hurts." He said, she'd hurt him enough that he'd extrapolated. He kissed her again roughly.

Then just as suddenly. He went dead. He had an epiphany his fingers still digging into her rear like talons and body heaving with breath. "The women. Stern thinks he's an animal. Stern thinks Borman is a boar. They share the women. That's why..."

She nodded. Her breasts rising inflating against him. "Back to Megan Colby."

He nodded. And plopped her down.

With very little grace he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, it came away pink pearl and saliva, both hers. She tugged her shirt, pulled at her waistband. Then they turned and walked shoulder to shoulder, through industrial metal doors and out into the sunlight.

* * *

><p><strong><em>"Tish please you're having a bad reaction." She came tearing out of his immaculate bedroom like the devil was on her heels. She was running for her life. What if they overpowered her? What if they held her down and finished her off? She was alone and outnumbered.<em>**

**_"A bad reaction. There's nothing wrong with me Roger, it's you. Take a look in the mirror." She swiped at tears of fear and rage and loathing. He reached for her and she recoiled. "I can't believe I almost… Don't! Just stay away from me." And she made it out of that den of inequity, but barely. And tracked her through the peephole with one passive bitter eye. Now they would have to find another._**

**_His partner the one that did the wetwork sauntered out unfazed by all the revulsion "Stuck up little prude. Too bad we have to let this one go." He tightened his belt "I'm not kidding Roger we can't afford another mistake."_**

**_"Get past it Scott?" He was furious._**

* * *

><p>They finally had a court mandate to ransack the apartment of Roger Stern. Alex had never felt so excited to ruffle someones hair, to spoil his unnatural order.<p>

"Coffee?" She asked Bobby.

"Do we have time?"

She checked her watch. "The 2-4 said 10 sharp." Sharp was a variable concept in their experience and nothing would move until they arrived anyway, it wasn't as if they could miss their own hunt.

"Okay coffee."

They'd been together long enough that the city was carved into coffee districts. Gimme Coffee was small red brick building with a matching red awning. The cafe had a few things going for it, an easy curb side pull up and a and bitter black breakfast brew. They alternated fetching duties. That Wednesday morning it was her turn.

Alex stood (another anonymous city dweller in another snaking line) tapping an impatient toe and fighting a yawn. The smell was intoxicating. She was tempted to pull her badge just to jump the cue and get that beverage into her belly 5 patrons sooner. She had been up until 2am scrubbing the sticky drippings from the fruit and vegetable drawers of her fridge. The behaviour was a holdover.

When Alex Eames couldn't sleep she cleaned. Her mother had been a real night person. When Alex remembered her tweens and teens It was always the nights, the slow slide toward sleep. Drifting off to a lullaby of clanking and clattering rising from the kitchen directly beneath her bed. There was something comforting in knowing that her mom was preparing lunches, and emptying the dishwasher. A reassuring racket. Now when she couldn't sleep she found the spirit of her mother in those nocturnal chores.

These days sleep was scarce. For some reason her head was full, absolutely stuffed with contradictions and cases _and Bobby_. And so on Sunday it was the grout around the tub with a toothbrush. And on Monday the windows and screens. Her apartment had never looked so good.

"Next!"

The cashier's firm young voice had her blinking back to reality. She'd finally reached the counter,

"Two large leftist espressos, a breve and an Americano, to go." She said and just like that her partner swept in from somewhere beyond the line and joined her. Bobby was supposed to be in the car. But 'supposed to' didn't cast a massive shadow. She gave him a quizzical look.

"What?" Her voice shook a little because this was exactly the kind of small unpredictable insurgence that was driving her to distraction. Suddenly he wasn't playing by their rules.

"And this." He aligned behind her reached around and slapped a biscotti down on the black granite countertop. Alex knew he hated packaged coffee shop biscotti. He called them sawdust.

**_He isn't playing by the rules,_** his only motive was to reach those big arms around her and lock her in. **_He isn't playing by the rules._ **When the barista turned away to steam and froth the milk. He pressed her to the ridge of the counter. **_He isn't playing by the rules_ **she felt the ridge of something else at the small of her back. He leaned over and whispered,

"No cream, no sugar. I forgot to tell you."

Now, after thousands of caffeine buzzes between them _that_ was the least newsworthy news of the millennium. She knew exactly how he took it. And like an ingenue straphanger in a rub-by assault she just stood there and wondered when they would both finally get off.

* * *

><p>It was over.<p>

The bad guys, _the animals_ were going away.

It was all finished but the paperwork.

Alex sat across from her partner scribbling away. She looked up and that was when she saw the distress. The thing about Bobby was that his body was a dead giveaway, at least to her. Every tick every twitch every rumpled brow and abrupt turn told her a story. And she knew that he felt deeply, too deeply. She had once taken him for self important and cavalier in fact it was the opposite he could be destroyed by his deep empathy so he distanced. Most days he was struggling not to drown in it.

"What is it?" She asked as he gripped his forehead and a sheet of paper.

"The South African source for Stern's anthrax, he told the FBI he gave Stern five grams of the stuff but our lab only found three in Stern's collection."

Yes, it was over but the smell of soured victory was rank.


	20. Chapter 20

**A PERSON OF INTEREST**

It was back. The anthrax. Or the spectre of it anyway.

Time had passed and she and Bobby had sailed away on that amnesiac sea. The same waters they sailed after every victory. Success was a very nuanced thing. They were but a slender layer of it, dependant on the system above or below to work as hard as they did. The forgetting was the way they coped with the scope of crime and criminality and with courtroom technicalities. Forgetting was the only way to appreciate their contribution and not lament their limitations.

But it was back. The anthrax. The missing quantity from Dr. Roger Stern's collection. He played dumb. He was dumb. From inside, from Sing Sing, now he was deaf and blind as well. He busied himself by manipulating people into a second, third and fourth visit. The last time they had seen him he looked haunted. He was missing and incisor and Alex had spotted a scar peeking out from under the sleeve of his jumpsuit. Crudely drawn, maybe with a determined fingernail or a sharpened toothbrush or seared in with hot metal. She'd seen the mark before on other claimed man. A bitchmark. Roger Stern had a boyfriend.

"I told you I didn't sell or give any of my anthrax away." And then a sneaky smile, and then a lazy gaze slithered down to the floor and he added, "Not all of it anyway."

Games, games, games.

He was useless to them.

* * *

><p>So they started at the beginning Connie Matson with her cracked skull and her furtive behaviour. Her murder had an eerie similarity to Buzz Davis. Alex stood in her cosy living room teeming with cops and CI's and wondered why. Different MO, different genders, different careers and yet the same. Another underachieving soldier in the government's army who had decided to climb out of obscurity by any means necessary.<p>

Bills for boosters, that was Connie's racket.

So many people walked the line.

And within 24 hours they had a heaven sent, bonafide suspect in the form of Dan Croydon of Haznostics. From the very beginning Bobby had been absolutely rabid about Croydon's guilt.

"Dial it back." She commanded.

"What?"

"I said _dial it back._"

And she remembered the last time she had cautioned him that he was losing perspective. Croydon was no Wallace, thank God. Dan Croydon was a blow hard with an inflated sense of importance but Alex saw something in her partner. A twisted glee. A glee at persecuting rather than lawfully prosecuting.

"He's the guy. Ego, associations, authority complex. The garnished wages are the financial icing." Bobby insisted.

She nodded. She agreed completely _right now_ but they were still on the surface, they hadn't begun to dig yet. Alex had felt those first niggles of intuition as they sat before Croydon's ex-wife. Her partner's behaviour! She had never seen Bobby inject so much of himself into an investigation. She could feel him getting giddy as the facts rolled in to support his preconceptions.

"Hey look at me," She actually reached across the console later in the car, she took his chin in hand and turned his head. "Look at me."

His eyes were hazy and disconnected.

"What?"

"The wife couldn't get a word in edgewise. And what she did say described a self absorbed workaholic, without any follow through, it doesn't stand up."

"How can you say that? He's a legend in his own mind. He doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself and he's cash strapped." Bobby pulled her hand off his face and let it drop. And that _stung._ After months of closeness, after fighting off his advances, after acknowledging her own swelling desire, after clicking tickety boo down their professional track have him shun her touch, to have her reservations not rate, it made her sad and it made her mean.

"Don't go off like some half-cocked fool, damn the consequences. Maybe you have more in common with Croydon then you think." Again that old case came floating back, that old rogue Bobby and his daily solo trips to Hudson University to play with Nicole. Alex brought worried fingernails to her mouth and raked them back and forth.

And Bobby, firm in his convictions and thoroughly annoyed with her dissension, didn't touch her for the rest of the day.

He didn't even look at her.

Not once.

* * *

><p>"Dr. Croydon would you be willing to take a blood test to prove that you haven't been exposed to anthrax or recently vaccinated for anthrax?" Bobby demanded over flashbulbs and microphones.<p>

Alex watched, her stomach churning from her perch against a patrol car. Bobby was in some kind of fugue state hunting this man with a single minded intent that scared her a little. When was the last time they had interjected at a press conference? Once. And on that occasion they had been requested. She had wanted to rip off his shades to see if his pupils had been replaced by whirling discs.

She called him that night. _She called him,_ he didn't call her, that was new. He was distancing.

"What are you doing?" She asked settled in on her couch in her sweats ready to resolve this, ready to get back to them. But he wasn't.

"I'm tired. This case… Can we just talk tomorrow?"

Alex stared at the handset and felt something swell and throb in her throat. _**What's this? Tears? Toughen up you wimp.** _She yelled like a drill sergeant over the drone of dial tone.

* * *

><p>There was something was building behind this case something sinister, something bigger. An unseen hand worked the pump. Everything was fuller, rounder, tauter. The bloat of it worked under the epidermal layers and up under limbs and inside their fleshy heads. The bloat filled rooms, pushed everyone uncomfortably out until they were enveloped by walls and coated creatures gripping their heads and screaming for relief. It wasn't an illusion the threat of combustion, the feeling that a pin prick of anger, a razor's edge of maladjustment or the fingernails of passion might release - to catastrophic effect - the full weight of all this pent up crud.<p>

And then it exploded.

He killed himself.

Dan Croydon hung himself in the shower stall of anonymous hotel room. And perspective was restored in one devastating flash. Watching him hang there Alex felt a rage inside it wasn't only the hippocratic oath that demanded Primum non nocere: First do no harm, it was a law enforcement oath as well. They were here to serve and protect and uphold. Her partner had violated that. He had lost sight of the good and Alex wasn't afraid to let him know how disgusted she was.

"I would never say anything in front of the captain…"

"Everything pointed to Croydon." His indignation was there but not an eighth as righteous.

"You didn't listen Bobby. You didn't listen to what his wife said." She left him in a state and seeking solace he followed her to their subterranean office, a corner of the parking garage where there weren't cameras or many prying eyes.

"You should take the day." She told him shaking her head.

"You mean you don't want to see me."

"Just take the day." She turned to leave

"Don't turn your back on me Alex."

"A man lost his life. He wasn't my friend or your friend or brother or son or father or husband but he was someone's and we have to think about our role in that."

"You mean me. I'm sorry." His eyes implored.

"It's a little late for that."

"So what? Now you see it. Now you see that I'm just a man and you don't like it. I made a mistake!" He had hoped she might be soft, he had hoped she might forgive him or touch him or hold him. It felt like the whole city was beying for his blood. He felt so alone.

"Just take the day." She said and walked away.

* * *

><p>And then the truth emerged and there was enough egg for everyone's face to get a glazing. Alex felt her anger slip away and the shame creep in as he listed the ways in which they'd been duped and he'd been framed.<p>

"If you don't incinerate Bentonite at a very high temperature it leaves a residue…"

"The fingerprints were under the ink…"

"And this "Innocent man driven to suicide by ruthless and incompetent detective…"

And it was more then just them. The partnership, sure, she would know, Deakins, Carver maybe even the guys on in the bullpen would learn how he'd been set up but the public, the people on the periphery likely wouldn't. His name, Detective Robert Goren, would forever be synonymous with this. It would colour future successes and taint the well for potential promotions. That was the thing about one major gaffe it could eclipse a lifetime of stellar records. Alex didn't know how he would handle this would he combust? Would he regroup? She realized this had been their first real test and she had failed him.

The trust was definitely dented.

"Lunch?" She asked.

"No. I'm keeping a low profile." And he didn't even look up and she ached with this distance. She couldn't figure out how the hell to bridge the distance.

"Call me tonight?" She tried again before leaving.

"I have something tonight, I won't be in." His smile was shallow. "See you tomorrow."

_**Won't be in? Won't be in? A date?** _How in the hell could he find a date in the middle of a crisis. _**You're jumping to conclusions.**_ No it was definitely a date. _**Or Carmel Ridge.**_ It was a fucking date. She almost couldn't breathe at the thought. It was the insanity of amour, they'd kept them a secret from the world, from each other and from themselves and now she didn't know what was real.

Had they had something?

Had something been building?

Hadn't he loved her?

Suddenly they were so platonic it felt like all of their dalliances were a dream. Or a sick fantasy. He had never wanted her. How could he? He was dating. He wouldn't look at her. He wouldn't talk to her at least not in any real meaningful way.

_**Look at me dammit. Just look at me.**_

But the connection was gone. It was day one of their partnership again and she was invisible. And she felt this unreasonable panic.

"Bobby?" She called to him again across their desks. Thinking if each moment was it's own universe and not a follow on, then maybe in some future minute the clock would reset and they would be them again.

"Mmmm?" He just stared at her his face set with annoyance.

"Nothing."

* * *

><p>The orchestrator of their downfall revealed herself during the dinner rush at Sal's Italian Restaurant in shimmering, golden fashion. She was a hot, bright nightmare with a quick wit and sharp knives. And unlike last time this time she reeked of money and influence. <strong><em>Of course, Nicole Wallace,<em>** he should have known. The stink of her was all over this disaster and she had promised him another dance.

"Do you remember what you said about Moby Dick and the unrelenting pursuit of evil. I know why you were unrelenting about Dr. Croydon. I know what it was about him that stuck to your hide like a harpoon. He ran out on his poor sick wife? Cheers Bobby. This was everything I'd hoped for."

He called a late night war room. Everyone assembled in Deakins' office as Bobby announced the return evil. He broke it all down, how she'd conducted their entire case, how they were all idiots but he was the biggest idiot of all.

Alex followed him into observation 3. That vicious bitch. Look at what she'd done to him. To them. He clung to that ledge like it was all that was keeping him upright.

"Croydon. She picked a man I already didn't trust, I already didn't respect. That's how she blindsided me. She ah…" and she heard his voice catch, "She picked a man like my father. She, she got me. She got me good."

"Then let's get her back."

Alex looked at him hunched in defeat. She wanted to cradle him, console him she wanted drop kick her badge and comfort her man. Because he was hers and she wanted to be on the inside again. She wanted be half of the special two again.

She wasn't going to fight this anymore.


	21. Chapter 21

Alex pulled along a very nondescript apartment block in Brooklyn, one in a row of siding clad rectangles that went on as far as the eye could register. She was looking for number 210. She had never been here before but she'd seen this address on so many pay stubs and close out forms that she felt like she had. As luck would have it a gold Toyota was pulling out as she arrived and she nipped into it's vacancy.

She trod up one storey and knocked on his door.

This was a bold maneuver. They had been very careful not to mix home and work, even now, even with scads of shenanigans going on. Home was still sacred. Home was a line that once crossed that couldn't be uncrossed. But then again they'd never had a day quite like this one before. He was hurting. And she knew that to be true because so was she. Sympathy pain. At least that was how it felt pacing her apartment relentlessly with a tickle deep in the tissue of her thigh and a low constant ache in her chest. She didn't want to know what it all meant. In another life Alexandra Eames might have been a scientist. She liked logic, reason and she liked to wrap her fingers around tangible things. This was very new and very unwelcome ground.

She knocked again.

"What?" He called through the wooden barrier. She could feel him eyeballing her so she turned her face to the peep hole.

"Let me in."

Silence.

"Come on Goren." She shuffled impatiently.

There was a click, flip, the creak of hinges and then a sliver of him appeared: an eye, an adam's apple, some buttons descending, his fly and a golden chain spanning the gap, holding her at bay.

"What are you doing here?"

"What am I? Dangerous?" She raised an annoyed hand and fingered the links of the chain.

"Very."

"Please." It was issued without hint of a plea. This 'please' was both a rebuttal and an order.

"We shouldn't be alone together…"

Her sigh was gusty she knew _that_ all too well.

"What are you doing here?" He asked again.

"Checking up on you."

"I'm fine."

"Let. Me. In." Her teeth were gritted and the words sounded feral.

He moved back suddenly feeling in danger of being attacked. He considered his predicament for 4 whole seconds before unlatching the chain.

"Bout time." She railed peeling off her damp coat and slapping it over the pony wall adjacent the door.

He turned and moved into the apartment. He showed her his back but his voice was clear as a summer's day. "Unless you came to fuck my blues away, go home."

She reeled just a little. He was vulgar when he hurt. He was sharp and punishing and dark. She saw a lot of things about him that she shouldn't have, illuminated by the gloom of his livingroom. She surveyed the components of his private space, a recliner, a low wooden coffee table, a floor lamp and leather couch. It was the house that brown built. In the corner sat a TV the kind with the big protruding tube not the sweet sleek modern style.

"You kiss your mother with that mouth?"

"Not lately." He was still in his suit, a paired down version with no jacket, no tie some wiry hair revealed below his neck. She looked up (way up, because she was wearing her Chuck Taylors which lifted her all of a quarter of an inch) into his silent glowering face. Then she looked down (way down) no socks, just big, wide, bunioned, leathery feet. And it occurred to her that this was a man. _A real man._ Big and bitter and ballsy. "What do you want?" He asked again staring at her like a nuisance. Staring at her like a snack.

"I … uh… I " She was suddenly at a loss for words without their desks and badges and _protocol._

"Yeah I thought so." He fell into his recliner like he weighed a ton or maybe it was just the weight of his thoughts. The chair took it all gallantly. She moved in front of him and screwed her courage to the sticking place.

"I want you." She said. Honesty _at fucking last_.

He looked up sharply. And she saw desire there. He couldn't hide it.

And something frantic in her said; **_Do it. Do it. Do it. Don't wimp out. Do it. If you don't do it it'll be over. This is it. This is all you're gonna get. Do it. Do it._**

So she did. She reached down and took her partners belt in hand.

"What are you…"

Then she undid it.

"Eames."

Then she unhooked him.

"God." He murmured.

Then she unzipped his fly, the _zuuuuup_ came concert with his sharp breath.

Before she could think she wriggled one intrepid hand under his waistband and deep inside his pants. He groaned.

"Sexual healing." She quipped and they both heaved out a single laugh. She freed him all soft and sloppy from the fabric, and _zing_, on a surge he was half up. She gave him a half smile then took her right hand and with a few efficient pumps had him to broad and vertical and happy.

"This is new." His voice was tight. "I thought we were going to tease forever."

"You need this tonight." She informed him. Then (this _was_ the night for surprises) she dropped to her knees and swallowed him whole. It was as abrupt, as raunchy, as submissive an act as either had ever participated in, _ever._ She could smell his must. Her lips tickled by that mat of coarse wires. And he could only _feel,_ like one great big throbbing nerve. His hand came up and tightened in her hair. His thick fingers lodged tightly at her crown and his other gripped the armrest.

"Oh God Eames." He flung his head back and it bounced against the headrest and returned to upright.

And she looked up at him there mouth spread taking him in a rhythm, to a beat. She wanted to make him feel like a man, like a king, like he had dominion over everything the light touched. This act wasn't something a woman could do by halves. There was no such thing as a 'kind of' blowjob. You either committed to the pleasure and vagaries of it or you packed up your mouth and found some other pass time. She gave it her all. She gave him something unforgettable to help him forget. She hummed and gripped and tongued and rimmed _and porn starred_ him into paroxysms of pleasure.

But she didn't give him _that_ not yet.

She lay her palms on his enfabriced thighs and felt them seize, she felt all the clues that it was building in him. The tension rose off him as heat, there was a little shuffle of feet on cut pile carpet and then the broad parting of legs. She timed her withdrawal perfectly. With a dramatic pop of severed suction she skittered back and stood just out of reach.

"_Fuck!_" He looked down at his glistening member then at her raw mouth, he'd been well on his way.

Torture.

This was torture.

"I guess the teasing isn't over." He ground out.

Alex didn't speak. Instead she unbuttoned her denim, then she wriggled out of tight jeans and damp underwear. He went stalk still. His eyes widened. He couldn't believe he got to have her. There was something about this woman, even when she was playing the submissive, even down on her knees she was _always_ in control. But penetration was so intimate, so traditional. It required trust and surrender. It was a higher plane of intimacy. He got giddy. He reached for her with desperation. He caught the fabric of her sleeve and pulled her into his lap. He kissed her hard and hot, in ways that moved them.

"I have wanted this for _so long_." he confessed. And he touched her everywhere because he could.

Alex couldn't do words and she didn't make him wait. She grabbed him tightly and guided him inside, lowering onto his lap.

"I want to take you to bed. I want to do this right." He told her his voice dipping in and out distracted by her tight wet seal.

She grabbed his mouth with hers and bit his lip hard, blood hard.

"Ow."

Then she was like a wild animal digging in, biting again, pulling his hair. Rocking with a furious pace. And he fought to tame her. He grabbed her knobby handles, her hip bones, and slowed her down.

"I'm going to shoot my load if you don't stop that." He gasped.

"I don't wanna stop!" The words were an earthy grunt and she clenched on him. "Just fuck me. Fuck out the demons."

She wanted to_ feel_ him. And she did, the length and strength painfully prodding her womb because he was big and she was small and their impact on each other was profound. He sunk those long talkative fingers into her pale cheeks and helped her with pace.

"Harder." She demanded.

The recliner rocked and squeaked. He slammed and she bucked with the force of him. She laughed hysterically when she careened to the side and he almost slipped out but he righted her and just kept slamming.

She closed her eyes then because it was coming. She courted the sensation. She arched to meet it.

He watched her taut body and crinkled eyelids and insecurity attacked him.

"Say my name." He rumbled that unabashed cliche. Bobby wanted to know that she wasn't conjuring Carver or some other faceless fuck. **_Say my name._** Maybe once upon a time the phrase had been a natural stop gap on the savannah, in the absence of paternity tests and private eyes. A man just need to know. If he held his woman unexpectedly to account _did she know his body? Did she know his seed? Was he the only one in the world?_

He desperately wanted to be her one and only.

Because he could care about this woman.

Who was he kidding, he already did.

"Say my name." he demanded again and grabbed her throat with one big paw.

"Bobby." She cried and her eyes flew open. "_Oh God Bobby._"

That flipped him into overdrive, her off-key need. She needed _him._ It had both of them wrestling and then grinding and then thrusting and then tensing and then _coming and coming and coming_ and then panting hard. And at last they sat there in a timeless link.

Lucifer was gone. He wasn't so scary, he'd been exorcised by a man, a woman and a La-Z-boy.

Funny (odd, not ha ha) in that instant it became real. Post chutzpah, post exertion, post euphoria Alex found herself inside a strange Brooklyn apartment naked from the waist down straddling her co-worker. Her legs twitched, her centre ached and she felt a draft on her calves. It was frightening in that aftermath for her to think of all the ways in which she'd let go. _With her partner._

_**Shiiiiiiit.**_

And it was exactly like that inside her skull. It came out as one long, low, extended, self-recriminating vowel of horror. He immediately felt her regret. God he hoped it wasn't regret. Then he felt her hands and shins digging into the soft seat preparing to launch back and get away. He tensed in anticipation, holding her waist. His rigor created a standoff, it created a supermax prison.

"Let go." she demanded.

"No."

"Bobby…"

"This is the part where we really get close." He whispered.

"This is the part where I go home." She tugged a bit more and felt him slip limply from her body. "My work here is done." She was going for irrevent quipster but she didn't quite pull it off. Instead he tucked that iron band around her even more securely and set to work lowering the zipper of her hoodie. And what he found! Her smooth peachy breasts bubbled and spilled out of a cream and aqua push up.

"_Jesus Eames!_" His eyes were like saucers. And she giggled, actually giggled because now she knew what Yukon gold miners sounded like when they'd struck the big one. "These require further investigation." He mocked serious, cupping each breast with reverence.

"Is that your professional opinion detective." She tried to play it straight.

He got serious. "Stay the night."

"I shouldn't." This sexual explosion, had been building in them for a long time, over two years. But what now? This didn't have a future. If anyone from work got wind they would be out of a partnership before the afterglow had diffused.

"Yes you should." He aimed his face for her cleavage she played keep-away exquisitely, given her limited latitude.

"Say it's just sex." She demanded bowing back and bargaining with her body.

"Fine it's just sex." He rumbled.

"I don't want a boyfriend." She sliced and she was a bit scary in her certainty.

"Clearly." He shot back. He had never met a woman who was less girlfriend material in his life.

"I should go." She said, because she was 'bravado girl'. And he saw into her. She set rules no one could live up to because her heart craved deep authentic opposition.

"No stay. I'm sorry."

She listed her deal breakers. "No showering."

"_At all?_"

She slapped him, "Together."

"Okay." He nodded.

"No long lingering looks."

He sighed. "Okay.

"No cuddling."

"Next you'll say no kissing on the mouth." He muttered.

"Are you calling me a hooker?"

"No. Just a control freak." He'd had enough. Before she knew what he was doing he grabbed her inelegantly around the torso and at the crook of one leg and stood. His pants plummeted to his ankles a true tripping hazard.

"This is messed up." She gurgled from where she hung low. "You're going to drop me you idiot." One of her legs already dragged on the ground she pulled into a ball, bracing for the impact. And as he started to move there was nothing reassuring about his potato sack shuffle.

"I might fall on you, but I won't drop you." The least reassuring words ever spoken. Progress was slow but there was progress nonetheless and at last he tossed her into the soft wrinkled centre of an unmade bed.

_**Quelle surprise. Brown sheets.**_

"I think I see the wet spot from your last conquest." She snarked.

"That's drool. I didn't expect to be entertaining." He collapsed heavily atop her.

"You sure know how to make a girl feel special." From Egyption cotton to Kmart percale. She unwittingly compared him to Carver. **_Cruelty thy name is woman._**

_**It's frailty, not cruelty,**_ someone in her head said and she swore the correction had been in Goren's voice. He'd been inside her body and he owned her mind. The thought _really_ made her want to run. She squirmed a bit beneath him and her eyes darted to the door.

He felt her tiny rebellion. _This girl_ was always looking for an exit. "Submit." he demanded his big face an inch away.

"Never."

"Submit." He tried again drawing his tongue down her neck and chest. "I want to taste you." He kissed his way between her mounds and down her stomach moving back on his haunches.

"You'll taste yourself." She could feel his seed oozing out and dripping down her thigh.

His head sprung up on a thought. "You're on the pill right?" He never did that, he _never_ forgot. Of course she'd ambushed him, but he'd been ambushed before and managed to stay sharp.

"Yeah. Of course. Don't worry your pretty little head about it." She said, always in control. Infallible Eames. He wanted to take that power from her. Bobby was quickly finding that bedding her was like the worst days of their partnership all over again. A struggle for supremacy coupled with overwhelming closeness. "You're clean right?" She fired out caustically. "All those secretaries…"

"I'm always safe." _**Until tonight.**_

"Good because you've been a busy beaver." She just couldn't let it go. She couldn't be casual about his casual sex. She was hurt. Irrationally so.

"Be quiet." He pulled her body down harshly. Off the pillow until she was flat on her back, until she was fully under him and dwarfed by his great shadow. He stared down hard. "I take a lot of lip from you. You tiny thing." He said but his eyes were glowing with affection because she was beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking here in his bed. Her eyes rich and warm. Her skin glowing and creamy. Her body small and perfectly feminine. Her face was still set _like cement_, but hey, you couldn't have it all right away. She wouldn't be Alex if she wasn't work."Soften up." He set out on a course of belated seduction. "You can unclench with me." He murmured. He kissed her so softly, butterfly kisses, then nuzzles to her forehead, her nose, her ears. "I know you." He whispered. He slid his hand down her forearm and kissed each one of her knuckles. "Alex." The x hissed through his teeth. "Alexandra." He sing songed nipping softly at her neck.

And Alex, who was not innocent, who had lain with several men, _who'd had a husband,_ hadn't realized it could be like this.

His words so buoyant.

His touch so fleecy.

Her body so babied.

"I don't want anything but you." He cupped her face and he held her gaze beyond the limits of convention, beyond anything normal. He didn't realize in that moment that he had found her most sensitive spot. Her ego. It was a brittle husk from years of empty swagger, absent of the replenishing drops of honesty. "You are beautiful, you're smart, you're strong, you're good, so good." His words drenched her, they slaked her and threatened to overflow through her eyes.

Alex felt her face heat uncomfortably at his words.

_**Do not cry.**_ Her inner warrior rebel screeched.

What the hell was he doing to her? He was such a giving earnest lover.

He swept a hand under her back, lifting her effortlessly and she clung to his neck and broad shoulder. She pressed mouth and nose to the hollow at the base of his neck. _**Bobby.**_ His musky, sappy, sticky masculine odeur calmed and comforted her. She clung, she knew she clung, like a babe. She couldn't help it skin to skin with him was a culmination. It was everything. Their, highs and lows. It was their successes and failures. It was the world, the beginning and the end and the middle a circle unbroken.

"You okay?" He murmured and she nodded against him. If she spoke her weaknesses would gush out of her mouth and all over their rumpled brown nest and set her limbs to trembling and he would _know _because she realized there in the nook of him that this silly malady was love. Alexandra Eames was profoundly, irrevocably, incontrovertibly in love with Robert Goren.

He unclasped her bra and slid it off and drew a perfect dusky pink nubbin into his mouth. "Perfect." he murmured pulling in her flesh as she arched into him, "You're perfect."

She fought those tears again.

She fought them with words this time.

"Just sex." She volleyed trying to convince herself more than him, but the richness of her voice was conspicuously absent, the words came out a hollow whoosh.

"Whatever you say." He murmured, rubbing his lips slowly back and forth across hers.

And that was when he felt it, a tenderness that he had never felt before. Her timid fingers slowly crept into his hair. Her thumb traced the folds of his ear. Her soft pads moved over the lines of his forehead. Her lips tripped over the arch of his brow. He was a sexual platter waiting for her to partake and yet she lingered here, just here, at the seat of his soul, where his mind, his expression, his very essence lay. She lingered over this face. She _honoured_ his cheek with the pillow of her palm. He leaned into her touch closing his eyes and she didn't pull away she _cradled_ him and something stirred in his chest.

"Just sex." She tried again.

"I think it might be too late for that."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Season 2 finis<strong>_


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